SMOKING TIGERS
by Kathryn Loggins

So Young Shelly Yo, USA 2023

Generally, I am a sucker for coming-of-age stories. I find it compelling to follow an adolescent on their journey of discovering something that will change them forever and alter the trajectory of their lives. SMOKING TIGERS was no exception. A beautifully shot feature debut by So Young Shelly Yo the film follows Hayoung, a sixteen-year-old, Korean-American girl living in Southern California, as she navigates school and friendships in the midst of dealing with the separation of her parents. Ji-Young Yoo, who deservedly won the award for Best Performance in a US Narrative Feature, portrays Hayoung with nuanced sincerity. So Young Shelly Yo also received recognition for her work by winning Best Screenplay in a US Narrative Feature at the festival. On the surface, SMOKING TIGERS is a very familiar young adult story about a girl trying to find herself and her place in the world, but Yo manages to give each scene weight and importance without being burdened by melodrama from which these stories sometimes suffer.

As the film opens, Hayoung is living with her mother and younger sister in a low-income apartment. The relationship between mother and daughter is strained, partly due to the pressure Hayoung’s mother puts on her to do well in school. Her father, with whom she has quite an endearing relationship in the beginning, is living in the warehouse where the carpets that he sells to the rich are stored. When Hayoung gets enrolled in an expensive prep school in order to get her grades up, she’s engrossed by her much wealthier classmates. Desperate to fit in, she lies about her financial situation and where she lives and finds initial acceptance and friendship. She gets a taste of what it’s like to live above her means and fantasizes that if her family could only live in the type of opulent houses, she’s pretending to live in her parents would get back together and they’d be a perfect family again. So Young Shelly Yo smartly uses the camera to capture many of these apparently perfect lives through glass windows, mirrors, or natural reflections, so that even though Hayoung thinks that’s what she wants, she’s never looking at something real. What she’s chasing is just a facade and as that facade starts to crumble, she is forced to take a hard look at her decisions, her relationships, and who she truly is and wants to be.