Selected for the ‘C-Films in Focus’ programme, Character Disappearing marks the feature debut of director and screenwriter Connor Sen Warnick. Set in 1970s New York, the film follows three interconnected young people in their 20s: Mei, a leftist activist; her partner Leonard, who seems to have affairs with other women; and Mei’s cousin Chris, a spiritual seeker who attempts to discover his ‘inner voice’ through an extreme regimen of breathing and purging.

Their lives unfold through quiet, loosely connected moments. They share family dinners, attend underground leftist meetings in Chinatown, and dream aloud about their future with poetry and photography. They are situated within the paradox of New York, where individual freedom and collective belonging, cultural diversity and racial marginalisation coexist uneasily.

According to the synopsis, the film is shaped by the ‘historical context informed by the Asian American Movement.’ However, the movement itself remains largely absent from the film. Only brief scenes hint at its presence, such as Mei’s activist group critiquing white supremacy and a community theatre hosts an eccentric ‘bachelor contest’ in which participants choose partners at random. Racial tension is conveyed mainly through dialogue like children mocking the characters’ race, and conversations among friends about the sense of displacement and alienation.   

Warnick appears to aim for an intimate portrait of Asian American interiority shaped by its historical moment, but the relationship between personal struggle and political context remains underdeveloped. The characters speak about identity and marginalisation, but these concerns rarely manifest through action, transformation, or narrative development. As a result, both the historical backdrop and the racial themes feel underexplored, leaving the film’s intended message somewhat diffuse.

Then, what is the film actually about? The film does not show a clear plot regarding the social movements or the characters. It feels like a photo essay or visual poem, composed largely with long, still shots in which characters talk, drift, and sit together in quiet spaces. The static composition, combined with the emptiness of sound and space, lets the audience immerse themselves in the characters’ lives – they wrestle with uncertainty about their identities and futures, seeking relationships and communities in which they might feel secure. Even when they are surrounded by others, they appear lonely and isolated. Their conversations always trail off without resolution, reinforcing a pervasive sense of incompleteness. The characters disappear in the finding of their authentic self, with their lives dissolving into the constant flux of New York,   

They also disappear in time, which is ambiguous in the film. Chris’s fascination with the diet of his grandfather, a legendary 250-year-old monk, introduces a mythical dimension to the narrative. While the story is ostensibly set in the 1960s and 1970s, the film offers few visual cues anchoring it to that period. In one scene, a woman crosses the shot wearing a face mask and a modern puffer jacket, which is clearly out of our current decade. This temporal blurring shows that the struggles experienced by the character – racial marginalisation, cultural displacement, existential uncertainty – are not confined to a particular historical moment. They reverberate across generations, persisting into the present.

All in all, Characters Disappearing is an ambitious work playing with the art of emptiness and ambiguity. The restrained soundscape and visuals create a contemplative space in which viewers are invited to inhabit the characters’ emotional worlds. The fragmented conversations and unresolved storylines evoke a lingering sense of incompletion, suggesting that the dilemmas faced by these young Asian Americans remain unresolved even today.

This poetic approach is also the film’s greatest risk. The absence of narrative momentum may leave some viewers adrift, while the underdeveloped historical context risks diluting what could have been a powerful engagement with the Asian American Movement – an important yet often overlooked chapter of American history.