On many levels, Cinequest is a reunion. People join together, yet again, and celebrate the influence of cinema in their lives.
A perfect example: John W. Kim’s film, Reunion, is a total crowd-pleaser, an indie comedy about mistaken identity. An Asian American man escapes his dead-end life working at a mortuary and decides to attend his 20-year high school reunion, in search of old friends who might save him. But he winds up at the wrong reunion, where everyone mistakes him for a reclusive Asian billionaire tech bro, the wrong school’s most successful alumni that no one has seen since high school. So he goes along with the charade, somewhat unwillingly pretending he is indeed the wrong person. He gets to live a lie for a few hours, while looking for love at the same time.
Surrounded by former prom queens, class presidents and football heroes, the protagonist thus slips into a lie that begins as survival and degenerates into temptation. As the night stretches on, old dreams resurface, romantic sparks flicker, his adventure becomes less about what’s true and more about what it means to finally be seen and accepted. What follows is a rocking tale of humor, romance and unhealed wounds from high school.
Reunion confronts many themes: What happens when toxic alienation and the grudges of youth percolate for 20 years? How does the way in which we define success affect our relationships, especially the failed ones? Why can some people just never seem to grow in life? And, if you’re the only Asian dude, or the only Black dude in high school, well, it seriously affects you.
Kim has been around, so the whole adventure is somewhat of a reunion for him too. A first-generation Korean American storyteller, he was born in Seoul, but moved to the US when he was four. A former Bay Area journalist who bopped around Mountain View, Santa Cruz and Palo Alto years ago, Kim worked as a newspaperman and then eventually found a life after journalism, a life in film.
On another level, Reunion took three years to develop. Kim and his crew began shooting on the very day that the Eaton and Palisades fires in Los Angeles first erupted. More than a few of his cast and crew lost their homes in the fires and were displaced during shooting. Even before then, a couple of strikes and the great contraction resulted in his production effectively shutting down in late 2024. Everyone told him not to film in Los Angeles at the time. He went ahead anyway and then the fires happened. As they completed principal photography in February of 2025, Reunion was one of only two features in production in LA county at the time.
But they got it done.
Now Kim returns to his old stomping ground with two Cinequest screenings at the California Theatre in downtown San Jose and the Alamo Drafthouse in Mountain View, thus hitting the old venue first and the new venue second, which brings us to another dimension of why Cinequest keeps evolving and adapting to the ever-changing landscape of the valley.
Many people on the peninsula, or in Palo Alto or Mountain View, can easily take Caltrain to the Alamo Drafthouse locations. Many people in San Jose can do the same thing. It’s a lot easier than it seems. The San Antonio Station is just a five to ten-minute walk away. Caltrain is rocking these days. The trains have WiFi. It’s a great way to make the journey either direction.
Both Mountain View and downtown San Jose have changed more times over the last 30 years than I can even count. Some of the change is for the better and some of it probably isn’t, but the last time Cinequest invaded the Mountain View complex that is now Alamo Drafthouse, the employees were blown away. They hadn’t really participated in a true indie film festival like Cinequest.
Now the bar is better and the food is better. There is plenty of space to get in the faces of the actors and directors who happen to be lurking in the shadows, or even just other film fans.
As always, it will be a reunion.
