Sipping green juice and stumbling into the wrong meeting on the way to your sobriety celebration can unleash cosmic consequences. That’s what two friends, Syd and Yvette, find out in Reckless Spirits, an upcoming multilingual buddy comedy feature by local Seattle filmmaker and former Northwest Film Forum executive director Vee Hua.
In the film, the two main characters inadvertently become entangled into a new age cult. Syd, a Latine performance artist, sees a golden opportunity. Yvette, a struggling Korean mental health therapist, only sees trouble ahead.
Hua developed the idea for Reckless Spirits with co-writer Lisa Sanaye Dring’s following encounters with new age religion while the two were living in Los Angeles in the mid-late 2010s. There they witnessed intensified commercialization and cultural appropriation of traditional spiritual practices — imagine $100 tarot readings and ego-driven white celebrity “gurus”, conartists, and charlatans. Reckless Spirits lampoons this phenomenon while also giving voice to middle millennial existentialism in a chaotic American political landscape.
It’s also inspired by Hua’s own experience growing up watching Chinese ghost story films. Syd and Yvette commune with their long-gone ancestors at comedic, inopportune moments. Reckless Spirits incorporates this cultural touchstone as a core part of the story— it aims to fuse the traditions of ghost stories that transcend Asian and Latino cultures.
In 2022, Hua and Dring produced a proof-of-concept short to outline and pitch Reckless Spirit’s core concepts. In the short, we see early sketches of Syd and Yvette’s encounters. The characters bring a dynamic range, veering across the slapstick, surreal, and screwball, and other forms of physical comedy. After previewing the short at festivals and industry events, they are now looking to adapt Reckless Spirits into a full feature film.
When completed, Reckless Spirits will be Hua’s first full feature from start to finish. They are excited to bring their ideas to life and view it as an opportunity to “put values into practice,” as they best put it and, “show creators from diverse communities that these kinds of projects are possible.”
Hua spoke about the role of comedy in helping persecuted communities survive. They describe Reckless Spirits as a metaphysical comedy for a bleak era — fitting that the project began also partly as a response to the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency. With the second election of Trump, and the ongoing fraying of the American social fabric, Hua sees a role for more films like this to lend voice to the powerless through joy and humor.
To support the film’s development, Hua is launching a public funding campaign on November 19th at the Northwest Film Forum. The launch will include a drag performance, a fashion show, tarot reading, and a screening of the concept short along with Q&A. The event will give attendees a way to interact with thematic components of the film as well as an additional community event for the holiday season.
