The Grace Lee Project (Fri., June 2, 7 p.m., $10, International House, 3701 Chestnut St, 215-387-5125) Do you know Grace Lee? According to this whimsical documentary, the chances are pretty good you do. The Missouri-born filmmaker behind The Grace Lee Project—whose name, of course, is Grace Lee—describes being haunted by the image of all the Asian-Americans who share her name. No statistics are produced to document the spread of Grace Lee-ism, but Lee does corral a remarkable assembly of randomly chosen passersby who all seem to have a Grace in their lives. As Lee asks each of them to describe their own personal Grace, a handful of adjectives recur: smart, nice, quiet, accomplished.

The Grace Lee Project

Perhaps not surprisingly, the same words turn up when Lee asks people to describe a generic Asian-American (although here the sample is skewed; Lee has stationed her camera outside a matinee of Miss Saigon). When Lee says she's intimidated by the achievements of all the other Grace Lees—the Harvard grads, the violin prodigies—she's really talking about her own struggle with Asian stereotypes. In seeking out Grace Lees who don't fit the mold, she's trying to give herself permission to be different.

It's not easy. Even the Grace who tried to burn down her San Francisco high school is described as a good student, merely attempting to eliminate evidence of a bad grade. And the exceptional ones, like the Honolulu TV reporter, seem too exceptional, members of a "sorority of super-Asians" in which our Grace is "the one loser." It takes some doing, and at least one transatlantic trip, for Lee to find a handful of fellow nonconformists: the Detroit Grace, known to her neighbors as Grace X, with a long history of African-American activism; a Korean-born adoptee who risked her own life to save a friend from an abusive husband; a Korean activist who opened the country's first lesbian bar. Although Grace X seems unstoppable, the second Grace describes her own struggles with fear and repression, and the last might have if she hadn't since gone back into the closet, forcing Lee to represent her as a pixelated, voiceless blob.

Self-indulgent by definition, The Grace Lee Project occasionally out-clevers itself; the canned soundtrack and cutesy-poo animation embody Lee's desire for acceptance in ways she probably doesn't intend. But Lee narrowly escapes navel-gazing, and finds a fresh and inventive approach to a difficult subject.

Con Man (Sat., June 3, 7 p.m., $8-$25, Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St.) When Alexi Santana deferred his Princeton acceptance by a year, the school had no idea it was so he could serve out a prison sentence in Utah—or that Santana was really a 31-year-old named James Hogue who had previously conned his way into a California high school at the age of 26. Jesse Moss, a former classmate of "Jay Huntsman" at Palo Alto High, tracked down a number of those who knew (or thought they knew) him: students who remember him shuffling and staring at his feet, track teammates who recall his prowess on the field (although as one observer points out, if you're trying to keep a low profile, "the stupidest thing you can do" is become a track star). Intriguing though it is, Moss' less-than-hourlong documentary is full of holes that even Hogue himself can't or won't fill. Hogue, whose money-shot interview is left until far too late in the game, glancingly describes himself as an addict, and Moss digs far enough into his past to find an aborted college career, the implication being that Hogue tried to do at 30 what he couldn't at 20. But if the movie is forgivably opaque on the whys of Hogue's crimes, it's strangely vague on the hows: How, for example, did a shy, balding student make his way into Princeton's most prestigious eating club? It's not even clear how Hogue got accepted in the first place. Moss flirts with a fascinating subject, but Con Man only skims the surface.

The movie, screened as part of the First Person festival, is preceded by a panel called "Secrets & Lies," with Moss and authors Mary Gordon, Michael Finkel and John Richardson. Panel tickets are $25; screening only (at 9 p.m.) is $8.

(sam@citypaper.net)