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DIRTY ROTTEN TOFU
and THE GOHAN GIRLS

Written, Directed and Produced by
June Inuzuka

Awarded (2023)

 

Best Short

LA Femme International Film Festival

Best Western Short

LA Independent Shorts Awards

 

Best Cinematography

Atlanta Women's Film Festival

introduction

This a story about people who are often left out of history or reduced to background characters. People of color and those with a diverse range of gender identities and sexualities faced not only the same challenges as other pioneers but the additional threats and dangers from a society that saw them as “other” or less than human. Yet they exemplied everything we imagine heroic and inspiring about the Old West and takes it one step deeper.

This novel western features three unique female action heroines: Sushi, Mochi and Ume who shoot, fight and dispatch foes with the best of them as they face impossible odds in a world that considers them little more than property to be used and discarded. The antagonist, Tofu, is the ultimate outsider, a slick, literate and tenacious rogue challenging the status quo.

June Inuzuka (writer/director) drew from her love of films like “Star Wars, “The Hateful Eight” and anime such as “Trigun” to create the vision of a western bar room that must have existed but has never been seen. Colorful characters like “Horrible Death”, an Asian woman who is hired killer, or the large and foreboding “Noodles,” represent people society excludes, fears or renders invisible. The characters names are anime inspired which adds an additional layer of fun and modern Japa- nese influences to the film. At the same time, the writer’s background as an historian grounds the film and gives it substance.

short film SYNOPSIS 

Log Line: In the Wild West, three Asian girls are forced to kick some major ass to defeat the Chinatown crime boss who wants them back "Dead or Alive."

 

In 1880’s Colorado, we meet the three western heroines, Sushi, Mochi, and Ume on the run from bounty hunters hired by their former captor, Tofu, a crime boss in Denver’s Chinatown. They realize there is only one way to permanently gain their freedom-- kill Tofu.

The overconfident Sushi directs Mochi and Ume to keep the bounty hunters busy while she returns to Denver to kill the dirty, rotten sonavabitch. Mochi looks upon this plan skeptically. Ume, who can’t speak, angrily rides away on her horse in disgust.

Will this plan succeed or ultimately kill them all?

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full lengtH
 
feature film

The western short film is a proof-of-concept for a full length feature showing the back stories of each girl and their training in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

 

 They are taken under the wings of such western legends as Annie Oakley, Chief Sitting Bull, and a drunken Chinese master called Old Lard Bucket. Sushi, Mochi and Ume must overcome fears from brutal pasts in order to become the formidable fighters needed to gain their freedom.

Tofu, the bar owner, drug dealer and pimp must constantly maneuver both the white crime world and Chinatown to maintain his position against his competitor, Bok Choy. When his partnership with the white hustler, Soapy Smith, turns deadly, Tofu manaages to turn the tables.  After several bounty hunters fail, he hires the infamous Bloody Espinozas to finish the job.  The action escalates to the final show down, guns blazing.

 

Keep checkin' in and hang onto your hats to see how this action packed feature project develops!

Illustrations by Fuji Dreskin

 Film Poster by Matao Dreskin

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