By Selen Ozturk, Originally published by Ethnic Media Services

Dr. Sam Jamier, executive director of the New York Asian Film Festival, is having a trailblazing directorial debut with Huntress on the Plains.

The film, currently in pre-production, is set in World War II-era Leyte, an island in the central Philippines. It follows a young Filipina woman as she forms an alliance with a Korean sniper conscripted by the Imperial Japanese army; the two unlikely friends attempt to liberate “comfort women” from occupied Asian countries forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army.

Directed and written by Jamier under Philippines-based production studio Fire and Ice Media, the movie is expected to finish production by fall 2025.

“I’m telling the story of what made these women 80 years ago — and in contemporary echoes, in Kurdistan, in Ukraine — take up arms in organized resistance,” said Jamier in a video interview with Ethnic Media Services from Manila, where he was location scouting. “That’s the challenge: I can’t claim their voices for myself, or just be a cultural tourist, but as a foreigner, I need to make their stories live for audiences across cultural lines.”

As documentation was destroyed en masse by Japanese officials after WWII, historians’ estimates of the number of comfort women range between 20,000 and 410,000 — largely Korean and many Chinese — in as many as 400 brothels across Asia.

In 1993, the UN estimated that by the end of WWII, over 90% of these women had died.

Jamier said that when he first began researching this story 10 years ago, “People kept telling me Korea, particularly, wasn’t ready for it … In Korean and Chinese films, it’s a story that’s been told many times: Japanese armies as a brutal, colonizing force. But the twist here is that the antagonist conscripted by the Imperial Army is ethnically Korean, as many imperial subjects were.”

“With the film, I’m trying to raise the question: What is a nation? What is a resistance fighter? You’re fighting for an idea of what your people are, and this sniper questions the idea that this means your enemies are non-people — which you see particularly in American media,” continued Jamier. “In Vietnam or Middle Eastern war movies, for example, they often don’t even translate the enemy’s dialogue. But why would the story of one American be worth that of 1,000 on the other side?”

“It’s an acrobatic line to walk. You need to show people what they want, in the sense that you need an audience, but there’s a major difference between what Korean films people like in Korea, versus in the Philippines or U.S.,” he explained.

For example, the Korean show Squid Game quickly became the most-watched series on Netflix after its September 2021 release, “but many people in Korea didn’t love it, partly because it was a heavily Japanese, Battle Royale-type survival narrative,” he added.

Jamier has walked this cultural line in his own life since growing up in Brittany, France as a Korean adoptee; becoming the first AAPI graduate of the École Normale Supérieure; studying further in Paris, London and Tokyo; becoming an English professor at the Sorbonne; and moving to New York City 20 years ago, where he has worked as executive director of the New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) since 2019.

“In northwestern France, I was basically the only non-white kid there,” he said. “One defining moment was when I was around 12, and one of my teachers said something completely absurd to me about samurai culture, and I didn’t know enough to really correct it … I’ve been learning extensively about East Asia since.”

Jamier left academia in his late 20s because he felt he was too young to teach, having pursued previous BA, MA and doctoral degrees in literature and medieval philosophy largely due to the autonomy afforded by getting paid to study.

“Now that I’m much older, I’d feel more prepared to teach — and the operation I run now, of mentoring people and curating these films, is similar to being an educator — but at the time, I was really glad to escape,” he said. “There was a massive global film culture in Paris and London that I loved. They don’t really have the categories of foreign versus American film that are so separate in the U.S.”

After moving to New York, Jamier worked in cultural programming as a diplomat for the French Embassy, and as a film curator for the Korea Society and the Japan Society.

He first worked for NYAFF, now in its 22nd year, in 2012 as a curator through a nonprofit partnership with the Japan Society.

After this, he stayed and grew the festival from a small operation focused mainly on kung fu genre films to an international event bringing film leaders — like actor Jackie Chan and director Bong Joon-Ho — from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and throughout Southeast Asia.

When Jamier first joined NYAFF, genre films were on the decline.

“I think kung fu’s last consistently great years were in the ‘90s. We had to look both backward and forward when it came to telling new stories — beyond prestige Chinese, Japanese, Korean productions,” said Jamier. “One of the first things I did was add a Philippine film section. It was a disaster. We couldn’t bring an audience at all.”

That 2013 lineup included the international premieres of “Aberya” — an occult superhero movie about a time traveling drug dealer, a nationalistic boxer, a holy prostitute and an ex-nanny social climber — and “The Animals,” a teen party movie set in a gated community, exploring and indicting the Philippines class divide.

“Over the years, we kept trying for engagement. We really broke through when we started bringing Filipino filmmakers and actors themselves. They all spoke good English, so they could talk about their work directly, with no interpreters. The best spokespeople of Philippine film are Filipinos themselves,” he continued. “Plus, they can all sing.”

Jamier said he feels no conflict between his work developing “Huntress on the Plains” and his work with NYAFF, even when things get busy.

“If you have a story to tell, you have to make the time. It doesn’t matter if you’re working at a bank or running a festival,” he added. “I believe you need a sense of internal necessity, like you can’t live without making that film or writing that book. But ultimately, you don’t need to do it. That’s the beauty of it. You have to feel emotionally or morally obligated to tell the story, to make it work.”

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