A teary melodrama about interracial relationships, transsexuals, adoption, assimilation, motherhood, and marriage—complete with flashbacks, dream sequences, and a catfight—Chi Muoi Lo's frantically overstuffed debut, Catfish In Black Bean Sauce, is like watching Pedro Almodóvar reborn as a bland, painfully earnest TV-movie director. For Chi, whose family was among the Vietnamese boat people who emigrated to the West Coast, Catfish is clearly a deeply personal project and at its best it resonates with admirable warmth and cultural generosity. As a first-timer, Chi's clumsy staging betrays some rough edges, but even a seasoned director would have trouble balancing a script that's brimming with forced conflict, cloying whimsy, and a half-dozen subplots too many. Chi casts himself as one of a pair of Vietnamese orphans raised by a black couple, played by well-matched veterans Paul Winfield and Mary Alice. His close-knit family is thrown into turmoil when his independent-minded sister (Lauren Tom) tracks down their birth mother (Kieu Chinh) and brings her to Los Angeles. Faced with tough questions about their identity, the siblings shut out their adoptive parents and strain their respective relationships, one with a Vietnamese refugee (Tzi Ma) and the other with a black nurse (Love & Basketball's extraordinary Sanaa Lathan). Chi lobs innumerable meats into his multicultural stew, including a talking cat, a Chinese transsexual, and an irate bank customer who behaves like a would-be black nationalist. The inevitable result is that he amasses characters and situations that can't possibly be developed yet have to be to resolved, leading to a histrionic climax that's as busy as the stateroom sequence in A Night At The Opera. A fine cast does what it can with the material, but there's no shortage of bad ideas in Chi's script—his decision to have his own character speak in street slang is especially egregious—and his good intentions don't carry over into moving family drama. Nevertheless, by the time Catfish drags to a conclusion, enough tears have been shed to fill a mason jar.