Toward the beginning of the film Red Doors, 60-year-old Ed Wong (Tzi Ma) has recently retired and spends his newfound free time watching hours of home movies of his three daughters as children. Seemingly bewildered by the changes in his life, in the subtle problems of his marriage and this new, uncomfortable freedom, he attempts to commit suicide by hanging himself.

But he is interrupted mid-attempt—the noose around his neck while he stands on a stack of books of Western philosophy—by his youngest daughter Katie, a hip-hop dancer and high school student who plants bombs in the locker of the boy who has a crush on her. Wearing a look of teenage sarcastic boredom, Katie glances at her father and tells him, “It's time for lunch, Dad.”

Despite the fact that Red Doors has many of the hallmarks of a stereotypical Asian American family story—the taciturn Chinese father, the superstitious mother, and overachieving daughters—it is almost immediately clear that Red Doors is something different.

The oldest daughter, Samantha Wong (Jacqueline Kim) may be a successful consultant about to be married to a wealthy, white businessman, but she still has feelings for her scruffy, musician ex-boyfriend. And middle daughter Julie Wong (Elaine Kao) may be a mild-mannered, shy medical student, but when she falls in love with Hollywood starlet Mia Scarlett (Mia Riverton, also a producer on the film), she is forced to come out of her shell as well as out of the closet.

“We never made Red Doors with the intent of being an Asian American film or a lesbian film,” insists Georgia Lee, the film's writer, director and producer. “We just made it to tell a story to reflect our own experiences, and try to be as specific and authentic to our own experiences with people, with our families.”

The film's three producers, Lee, Jane Chen and Mia Riverton, were all classmates at Harvard University, struggling to meet their Asian American parents' expectations, before they forged their own, unique career paths.

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