Over the course of 2005, at film festivals across the country, there has been a confluence of women who share a few striking similarities. Last June, for example, at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 Theatres during the Los Angeles Film Festival, you may have been able to see — in the darkness of the movie theater — that the women in question are Asian American. But there’s more.

It becomes crystal clear what they have in common when the name “Grace Lee” is called and they stand up from their seats to a round of applause. These are some of the women featured in the documentary that just screened, titled “The Grace Lee Project.”

“It’s exciting [when Grace Lees attend screenings] because I know them and I’ve been living with them in the editing room for, like, forever,” says the Grace Lee who co-wrote and directed the film.

Hyperbole aside, the truth is that the filmmaker Grace Lee was not aware, back in the day, that her name was as common among Asian American girls as kimchi in a Korean household’s refrigerator.

While growing up in Columbia, Mo., where Asians were few in number, this Lee had the market cornered in her hometown when it came to her name. But it all changed when she left the Midwest after college for cities like New York and San Francisco, with larger Asian American populations.

Grace Lees, with the filmmaker Grace Lee second from the right, get together for a group shot at a screening in Toronto.

“I’d introduce myself at party and somebody would always get this look in their eyes, like, ‘I know a Grace Lee. She went to Harvard at 16.’ Or, ‘She’s a violin prodigy.’ It just came off their tongue so easily, how perfect she was,” says Lee.

“As it kept happening, I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ I would ask the person, ‘Well, what happened to her? Can I meet her?’ Nobody knew what happened to her. So it was just this strange thing of Grace Lee being incredibly impressive but also totally unmemorable.”

And another pattern emerged: The Grace Lee being described always fit the model minority stereotype.

“When people talk about Grace Lees, it struck me that that’s how people talk about Asian Americans in general: quiet, passive, nice. It was just these surface-y things,” says Lee.

“So these experiences kept building year after year, and I always joked that I would make a documentary in which I would seek out these Grace Lees and find out what happened to them. It didn’t really start until I was in film school at UCLA, and I started thinking more seriously about the idea. It crystallized one day when I was walking down the hallway in the Asian American studies department and I saw this flyer [for a guest speaker named] Grace Lee Boggs.”

Lee went to hear Boggs, a 90-year-old Chinese American woman who married an African American and was active in the civil rights movement in Detroit during the ’60s with the Black Panthers.