Deepa Mehta directs story of Detroit fashion designer in ‘Little America’ Season 2

By Noel Ransome, The Canadian Press on December 9, 2022.

TORONTO – In the first episode of the new season of “Little America” director Deepa Mehta guides a story that touches on the pressures some children of immigrant families feel to fit into traditional definitions of success.

It’s a topic she’s excited to tackle in her return to the eight-part Apple TV Plus series for Season 2, she says, adding that as an Indian-Canadian immigrant herself she can relate to the show’s exploration of those “universal questions” she’s had since becoming a Canadian citizen.

“My whole search in life I feel has been – what does it mean to belong? Who sets the rules for what belonging is when you leave one country and you migrate to another?” says the Indian-born Canadian filmmaker.

The story Mehta commanded is loosely based on Detroit fashion designer Luke Song who catapulted into the spotlight after designing a bow hat worn by Aretha Franklin at U.S. President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

The episode stars “Minari” breakout Alan S. Kim as Luke, a young boy who helps his hat designer mother, played by Lee Jung-Eun, run a business. When radio personality Martha Jean, portrayed by Phylicia Rashad, takes notice of Luke’s artistic talent, a conflict forms between his longing to become an artist and the expectations of his Korean mother and father for him to study medicine. Ki Hong Lee plays Luke as a young adult.

Much like the first season, the show is focused on the lives of immigrants who find varying paths toward the American dream.

Culture-mixing stories play out in dramatized vignettes – for instance a Japanese mother creating an all-woman baseball league in Ohio, and a nanny from Belize finds her calling when working for an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn.

In the episode Mehta directs, titled “Mr. Song,” the vulnerability of a young man seeking to carve out a life based on his passion spoke to her.
“I remember when I told my father I wanted to be a filmmaker, there was a sort of dead silence,” says Mehta whose dad was a film distributor at the time. “Maybe because I wasn’t really brilliant at school or something, but my father felt the way of tomorrow was science.”

Like Luke, before finding her own calling Mehta admits to moments in university when she would sit in her chemistry and physics classes in a state of dumbfounded longing.

“I’m just sitting there and saying, “˜what are they talking about?’ It’s when I realized that this is not what I wanted to do,” says Mehta. “It isn’t that my parents threw a fit, but my father said, remember two things in life – you will never know when you’re going to die and you will never know how a film will be received.”

The bet paid off for Mehta, whose internationally recognized films such as the elemental trilogy “Fire,” “Earth,” and the best foreign language Oscar nominee, “Water” are among the dozens of her works that use immigrant experiences as narrative anchors.

Mehta says she developed an immediate connection with the real-life Luke.

“He continues to be this dutiful son who’s celebrated all over the world, because for him, what’s important is warmth, duty, and responsibility,” says Mehta. “You can have all of that as well as not sacrifice your own art.”

While “Little America,” which is written and executive produced by Lee Eisenberg, Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, continues to knit together multiple immigrant touchpoints through a hopeful lens, Mehta says that notionshouldn’t stand on its own.

“We do need positivity, but not positivity that’s tokenism. It has to be based on reality,” she says.

“What I loved is that none of it felt that it was tokenism to different cultures, but a very universal theme. The theme of solidarity, the theme of loving, the theme of carrying and finding what’s good for you.”

“Little America” Season 2 premieres globally on Dec. 9, on Apple TV Plus.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 9, 2022.

19
-18