Red Doors is about a family where everyone seems to have somehow lost their emotional connections to each other. The family in the film is Chinese-American, and that is both relevant and not relevant to the film. It's not relevant in that this story -- parents and children cut off from each other and struggling to reconnect -- could have been told about any family. The family's race is relevant to the history of the film, though; filmmaker Georgia Lee and her producing partners struggled to get the film made. They had interest from studios, but only if they would make the family Caucasian instead of Asian, or if they would make the lesbian couple in the film a heterosexual couple. Lee and her partners wanted to make the film on their own terms, though -- they are Asian-American, and they wanted to make a film with Asian-American actors, and tell an Asian-American story in a way that wasn't stereotypical. So they raised the funds themselves to make the film they wanted, and Red Doors is the result.

The red doors of the film's title refer to the front doors of the Wong family's home. In Chinese culture, red doors are supposed to be lucky. The doors in the film, and the title of the film, therefore, are ironic: The Wong family is distant and unhappy. The family patriarch, Ed Wong (Tzi Ma), has just retired, and on the eve of his retirement is secretly planning to leave his wife and three grown daughters to find a sense of meaning in his life. For Ed, being the father to his daughters and provider for his family was his whole sense of identity. Now his daughters are grown and no longer need him, he has grown old and and is no longer needed on his job, and Ed is lost and floundering in a deep depression, unable to even voice what is wrong with him.

Samantha (Jacqueline Kim), the eldest Wong daughter, ought to be happy. She's living the American dream: She is successful at her corporate job, and is engaged to a handsome, prominent businessman who seems to suit her perfectly. But as Sam approaches her 30th birthday, she begins to feel a deep sense of dissatisfaction for the path her life has taken. A chance reconnection with an old boyfriend, who is now a music teacher, reminds her of the dream she once had to be a ballet dancer, forsaken to please her parents. As old feelings (and old desires) rekindle within her, Sam finds herself at a crossroads, where she must decide whether to continue down the successful, albeit emotionally empty life she has crafted to please her parents, or to take the fork in the road down a path not traveled, in the hopes that a more deeply fulfilling life lies at the end.

Middle daughter Julie (Elaine Kao) has always been the shy, quiet daughter of the family. She is a fourth-year medical student, and the one creative outlet she allows herself is a ballroom dance class. Julie is heads-down focused on her work at the hospital. Too shy to make connections with her coworkers, she drifts in solitude, looking in from the outside at the easy social rapport the people around her have. Then Julie meets Mia Scarlett (Mia Riverton), a popular actress who has come to the hospital to learn how things work in preparation for a role as a doctor, and her world turns upside down. Julie is the one person who doesn't fawn all over Mia, and when she helps Mia after the actress loses it watching a surgery, the two become friends -- and then lovers. But Mia has a reputation to maintain with the press as a wild girl with a lot of lovers, and she and Julie clash over the way Mia presents herself, and Mia hiding her relationship with Julie.

Katie (Kathy Shao-Lin Lee), a senior in high school, has a rebellious streak and works through her adolescent angst by engaging in a game of prank warfare with Simon, her next door neighbor and sworn enemy. The two are attracted to each other, but rather than communicate their feelings, they hide them behind a series of escalating pranks that grow increasingly dangerous. Katie, like her sisters, is also a dancer, but she prefers hip-hop to ballet. She leads a hip-hop dance troupe at her school, but is convinced that no one in her uptight Asian family could possibly care about what she does.

As Ed prepares to leave, he grounds himself in his family by watching old family videotapes (real footage from the director's personal collection) of his daughters when they were small, miring himself in how much they loved and needed him then, and how much things have changed. It's as if Ed is trying desperately to reconnect with a happier time, but the signal just isn't getting through. When Ed leaves, his wife, May-Li (Freda Foh Shen) is utterly devastated. Her husband has not only left her, but has violated the very tenets of their culture in doing so, and she doesn't know how to deal with it.

After introducing us to the Wongs and their problems, Lee moves us gracefully along through the story as each daughter faces her fears and her issues. Sam must ultimately track her father down at the upstate New York Buddhist monastery where he has sequestered himself, in the desperate hope that she kind find a way to reach him. Ultimately, of course, each of the Wongs will, in one way or another, find their way, but how they get there, and the paths they take, are what makes Red Doors funny, warm and engaging. You don't have to be Asian-American to appreciate the Wongs with all their flaws and missteps; this could be your family, or the family of anyone you know, and in that way the film crosses that invisible genre line in the sand. The Wongs may be uniquely Chinese-American, but their problems are not, and that gives the Red Doors a universal appeal.