A queer coming-of-age romance set in a Chinese restaurant - Lucky Fish

In her debut short film, writer and director Emily May Jampel stages the perfect meet-cute between two Asian-American teenagers who share a similar distaste for their respective families’ expectations about who they should be. In Lucky Fish, Lukita Maxwell (AppleTV+'s Shrinking, HBOMax’s Genera+ion) stars as Maggie, a young girl aspiring to attend Sarah Lawrence a.k.a. “the lesbian art school?” who tries to dissociate during a dinner with overbearing adults at a Chinese restaurant.

In the bathroom, Maggie encounters Celine (Anna Mikami from The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, Birds of Prey) who leads her into a room with a fish tank - a dreamy, almost-forgotten world where anything seems possible. In the midst of making awkward conversation and stealing glances at each other, Maggie and Celine find reasons to be slightly less miserable at dinner.

From the get-go, Lucky Fish feels like a journey into a familiar world of fleeting crushes, teen angst, and the thrill of quiet, unexpected desires and rebellions. Jampel meticulously invokes nostalgia for liminal spaces à la 90s teen romances like Romeo + Juliet. Unlike these films, however, the stakes are relatively low for the leads in Lucky Fish (no one dies and families are not torn apart, phew). It really just is a short, sweet film about sapphic euphoria which, some would argue, is rare these days.

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