Filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña talks PBS' 'Asian Americans'

"Asian Americans," a five-part film airing Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m. on WNET/13, covers the long, rich and — yes — fraught history of Asian Americans in the U.S. Produced by a team of acclaimed Asian-American producers, they were led by someone who took a quarter century to bring this story to the screen.

Renee Tajima-Peña, professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, has been a leader in the Asian American documentary film community for years. Her many films — including Oscar-nominated "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" (1987) and more recently "No Más Bebés" — are deeply reported, intimate explorations of race, ethnicity and the American experience. That also happens to describe this landmark film.

 I spoke with her recently. Excerpts from our conversation: 

It's 2020 — why'd it take so long to finally get a film on Asian Americans on PBS? 

 I wrote a treatment for an Asian American series 25 years ago, and have made different attempts over the decades. [For this film] it took a while to raise the money — the same old song you hear from every filmmaker

How to confine such a huge subject to just five hours? 

 From the very beginning we knew we couldn't be representative to everybody. It's television. We want to engage to an audience. So we focused on stories.  And with all of the filmmakers here, that's the kind of films we make — films about people. The themes emerge from those lives. We also wanted to find stories that really connected to today.

The series gets into representation on TV and in the movies — and you once were a movie critic (for the Village Voice) so I imagine you have some thoughts about this question: Is Asian American representation on primetime improving or not? 

 It's a whole new world! I'm really optimistic. You've got more Asian Americans who are showrunners and if you look at the casts of shows, they are all much more diverse. My kid, who is 21, is accustomed to seeing all kinds of people of all kinds of color, and expects to see that on the screen. That is what [his] generation expects.

 This film couldn't be more timely — in April alone, the NYPD Hate Crimes unit cited 13 attacks against Asian Americans. 

With the history that we looked at in the film, these fault lines have existed since [Asians] started coming here — the fault lines of race and xenophobia — and in times of crisis, this erupts … We're in that double-bind right now.

You got your start almost out of college making a film about a young Asian-American man who was murdered in Detroit in the '70s. Parallels with this time? 
I think it's risky to invoke that [with this moment] because there are African American men who are being killed, whose killers are not getting justice. … But we are seeing a lot of discussion among Asian Americans that that's our fight [too], and that we have to step up and show up for other Americans who are facing the same rot of racism. Racial violence is now on the rise against Asian Americans but it's been a constant drumbeat against black and brown Americans.

 Does that get right to the heart of the message of the series? 

The message of the series is that we're all in this together. It spans these tipping points in American history [and] a lot are points of crises. But how did Asian Americans respond? They responded by going to the courts and really trying to uphold the Constitution [or] by running for office. The series is not so much about how Asians became Americans but how they helped to shape America. Before coronavirus, we were as a nation becoming more diverse but also more divided. How do we move forward together? So much of the Asian American story speaks to how we move forward together.