Ivan Kander

As COVID quarantine began back in March of 2020, I made a glib tweet about how many bad two-hander shorts we were going to see a year later. It was early into the pandemic—a period that seems, oxymoronically, ancient yet recent. After all, it’s now October 2021…the pandemic is still very much here, and yet, it feels like so much has happened and changed since those first few months. I also realize in retrospect that my tweet came from a snarky place of privilege: I mean, I had the luxury of being able to sequester in my house (albeit with two screaming children). I wasn’t struggling to keep a retail business afloat nor was I an essential worker who had to venture out into the “real” world.

I wasn’t wrong about the influx of bad COVID two-hander shorts, by the way (there were plenty of those), but, admittedly, I also miscalculated how filmmakers would use the tools of cinema to convey stories set within the pandemic in order to articulate just how wide-reaching it was as a shared global event. More importantly, these stories were often more profound and meaningful than those throwaway anecdotes about running out of toilet paper or having trouble with Zoom connections.

Leftovers from Short of the Week alum Law Chen is very much that sort of project: a hyper-specific look at pandemic life back in the spring of 2020. We follow Steven, an affable young man who is struggling to keep his family’s Chinese restaurant open during an epoch that was brutal on the restaurant industry (roughly half of the United States’s Chinese restaurants have closed as a result of COVID). The film captures both our antiquated sentiments to the pandemic in those early days (it’ll be over in a few weeks!) to the pervasive ignorance and lack of compassion that continues to pervade the cultural conversation (Trump may be gone, but we are still convincing people to not inject themselves with horse paste). It’s an honest slice of life that, as a second-generation immigrant story, tackles the confluence of COVID with racism: in this case, specifically racism against Asian Americans. Obviously, there’s Trump’s direct influence in the discourse (and his shadow looms over the film in an overt manner…how it could it not?), but it’s also present in more insidious ways as it explores implicit bias in American society.

As Chen relates to Short of the Week:

Yet, despite being about very “heavy” things, thankfully, Leftovers is not a misery fest. Chen dutifully balances the tonal line, straddling comedy and drama. Moments are genuinely funny (Steven’s Uncle smoking through his surgical mask!) yet things never become so jokey that he loses the compassionate thread that ties it all together. The craft is strong too. I think the film is naturalistic and objectively well-shot (lensed by cinematographer Tinx Chen) and the 4×3 aspect ratio feels like a fitting choice for a time when we all felt so boxed-in.

“We took a documentary approach with a skeleton crew to intimately capture the authentic world of immigrant life in Chinatown” – Director Law Chen

The film’s climax, at first, seemed circumspect to me: I mean…how on the nose, right? There’s no way that somebody could actually be that overtly cruel… But, Chen, seemingly in response to my rhetorical question, provides an answer in the credits, showing the social encounter on which it was based. Yeah, people really were (and continue to be) that crappy…

The pandemic isn’t over…not by a long shot. But, Chen’s film serves as a narrative document to a very specific time during its initial days. Smartly he realizes that, as a global event, COVID is impossible to encapsulate in a single film. And, so, we must focus on the small personal stories that become the fibers of the larger tapestry.