Author's Note
I started writing this to make sense of the quiet weight we carry across generations — the things we don’t say. The roles we inherit. The places we leave to become ourselves.
“Some of us learn to leave. Others learn to stay. He had to learn how to let go."
Why I Wrote This
As someone with a lived AAPI experience, I wanted to write a deeply personal, sweeping, and emotionally honest screenplay — a quietly radical love story that challenges how we see masculinity, memory, and what it means to be truly seen.
It explores the Asian diaspora in the U.S. and beyond as a second-generation immigrant, while also delving into the universal themes of loss, longing, isolation, and co-dependency.
The Emotional Journey
What begins as a slow-burn romantic drama for our lead, Brian, evolves into a complex emotional survival story.
This isn't a film about winning someone back — it's about how silence accumulates. How the things we repress in the name of survival eventually become the very things that isolate us.
Brian doesn't explode. He erodes. And Sleeping Man in Orbit reminds us that while the past shapes us, it doesn’t have to define us — and that vulnerability, even if it arrives too late, may be the only way forward.
AAPI Commentary
Sleeping Man in Orbit does something we’ve rarely seen: it centers a British-born Chinese man not as a stereotype, but as a romantic lead with a depth that would make a Murakami protagonist envious. Brian isn't here to prove anything. He listens. He falters. He loves imperfectly. And in doing so, he is given the space to be deeply vulnerable, quietly magnetic, and central to a modern love story.
Supported by equally compelling female characters, the film builds on the cultural breakthrough of Everything Everywhere All at Once to explore the emotional dissonance of generational trauma and the silent weight of unspoken expectations. This is a screenplay not just timely, but necessary. A film that demands to be made.
Sleeping Man in Orbit reminds us that anyone can be the hero — and that sometimes, the characters in the background hold the true heart and soul of the story.
A love letter to every "supporting" man who deserved to be seen.