Like her 2004 short film 9:30 (winner of several Short Film and Student Film awards) about a backpacker from abroad who finds his way to L.A. to escape a love lost, Mun Chee Yong’s WHERE THE ROAD MEETS THE SUN follows Takashi (Will Yun Lee of WHAT’S COOKING? and most recently seen in HAWAII FIVE-O) from Tokyo to L.A. similarly escaping a love lost. A brooding drifter, Takashi has forgotten much of the painful details of his past after suffering a serious accident that caused him to go into a coma for several years.

WHERE THE ROAD MEETS THE SUN, Yong’s full-length directorial debut, lands us smack in the intersection of the lives of four men who have drifted into a low-rent hotel in gritty Los Angeles, set vaguely somewhere between East Hollywood and Echo Park.  Like Takashi, hotel manager Blake (Eric Mabius, UGLY BETTY’S Daniel Meade), is also searching for the meaning of life after a love lost, though his is through divorce. Julio, (Latin T.V. star Fernando Noriega) just wants to work and earn enough money to send home to his wife and kids in Mexico. Guy, a Londoner who overstays his tourist visa, seems to cruise along while never failing to get himself and his hotel mates into trouble. Despite being fiercely independent characters, Takashi and Blake forge a deep friendship as Blake is intrigued by Takashi’s ability to forget his past and start over. Meanwhile, Julio and Guy manage to get into all kinds of trouble, betray each other’s trust and then realize that they’ve formed a friendship borne out of shared experiences.

 While all four characters don’t want to get “stuck”, it’s hard for them to get out of their current limbo, since they don’t know quite where they’re headed.  Their aimless drifting, temporarily stilled by the fragile bonds of friendship, seems befitting of the lyrics from the iconic Leslie Cheung song that Takashi shares with Blake: “The wind continues to blow…I don’t want to leave.” (from Cheung’s 1983 Cantopop hit, The Wind Blows On.) 

Synopsis written by: Vera DeVera