What's In A Name?
In “Searching for Angela Shelton,” the filmmaker Angela Shelton embarked on a quest to find other women across the country who shared her name and, surprisingly, her story of abuse. And in order to highlight her subjects’ similarities, Shelton purposefully ignored a few obvious differences. Though she makes a point to mention that half of her Angela Sheltons are black and half are white, race never really surfaces as a central theme. Unlike “Searching for Angela Shelton,” “The Grace Lee Project” worked to discover and eventually celebrate the differences among a group of name-sharing women, many of whom happen to be Asian-Americans. Instead of zeroing in on one or two aspects of her interviewee’s lives, she allowed them to direct how their stories would ultimately be told. Both filmmakers used “the road” as a means to connect to other women with whom they have ties, and both returned home having been changed by their experiences. One difference between the two, however, is that Grace Lee intended to "race" the road, morphing her quest into a search for the nature of Asian-American womanhood as filtered through the name Grace Lee. Though “The Grace Lee Project” did not have as intentional a message, it was easier and more enjoyable to watch. The stories of these Grace Lees were told much more in depth, rather than provoked out of them by a filmmaker using her subjects’ stories to tell her own. The big difference between the two? Angela Shelton tries to prove that we ARE all the same (“We are all Angela Shelton”) and that we must come together as one entity. On the other hand, Grace Lee is trying to dispose of the stereotypes that hound many of her subjects; to show that, despite certain similarities, they are NOT all the same, and that our individualities as American women are things to be preserved.