Katy struggles to accept her culture due to her fear of judgement from her friends.

Just Eat

While painting a portrait of indigenous Aeta natives in the Philippines, Ciara Morena, an insecure folk artist, runs out of brown paint to complete her piece. At the art store, she hesitates to pick up the darker brown paint after thinking about her mother’s warnings about becoming too dark under the sun. To top it off, she overhears customers talking about tanning and skin whitening pills and faces a tenant who mistakes her for a facility employee due to her appearance. Fed up with the triggers and microaggressions, Ciara resorts to skin whitening cream after she sees an ad. When the cream arrives the next day, she tests it out and begins to hallucinate flashes of her ancestor, a Kalinga Warrior. As the side effects and hallucinations worsen, Ciara discovers a side effect of the product and must rush to the hospital before it erases every trace of her existence...and her. Director Biography -&nbsp;Nicole Mairose Dizon <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/9a4a4b5a45054801dc4cc448c0636d49.png" width="193"> Nicole Mairose Dizon is a first-generation Filipina-American writer/director/producer from Baldwin Park, CA, who elevates bold, inclusive storytelling as radical self-care. After she graduated Cum Laude with a Film &amp; Media Studies B.A. from UC Irvine, she worked for Apple TV+, ICM, and Scott Free. Dizon currently works as the Writers' Production Assistant for Amazon's Blade Runner 2099. Her magical realism short, Morena, premiered at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and was nominated for a Jury Award at the inaugural Yale Summer Cabaret: Summer of Love Film Festival. In<a href="https://deadline.com/2021/02/film-independent-project-involve-2021-1234699346/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> Film Independent’s 2021 Project Involve</a>, she produced Dear Mama... and The Mason Ring. Dear Mama… premiered at<a href="https://deadline.com/2022/02/sxsw-2022-films-lineup-schedule-1234924852/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> SXSW</a> and was awarded a Special Mention by Aspen ShortsFest. The Mason Ring won HBO Max’s 2022 Best Short Film Competition at Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival. When Dizon’s not working, she hikes and watches baseball (Go Dodgers!) and F1.﻿

Morena

After an insecure folk artist seeks out skin whitening cream to cope with everyday life, she races to reverse its terrifying supernatural side effects.

Tired of getting pushed and punished by his own parents, Wei-Lai, an 11-year-old Chinese American boy, decides to show up at his best friend’s family and offer himself up for their adoption. Director Biography -&nbsp;Robin Wang<a href="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-storage.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/001/969/610/original/a2e9ef5b34-headshot.jpg?1639856573" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><img src="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-storage.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/001/969/610/thumb/a2e9ef5b34-headshot.jpg?1639856573" style="border: none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle; display: block; height: auto; max-width: 100%; position: relative;" width="172"></a>Zhongyu (Robin) Wang is an award-winning director and screenwriter. He graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English (Highest Distinction) and is now an MFA candidate in Film &amp; Television Production at the University of Southern California. He is the recipient of the Lemkau Family - Goldman Sachs Scholarship and the Irvin Kershner Scholarship, two of the most prestigious awards bestowed by the School of Cinematic Arts. Robin was born in Xi'an, China in 1995, and decided to study abroad to pursue his passions for filmmaking. It was in U.S.A. that he gradually picked up his filmmaking professionalism. Till this date, he has completed six narrative shorts that are official selections at festivals including Urbanworld, LA Outfest, Out on Film, Atlanta (Oscar-qualifying), Outfest Fusion, NewFilmmakers Los Angeles, Chinese American Film Festival, as well as streaming platforms such as Dekkoo and RokuTV. His works have also been featured twice on Deadline.com. Director Statement“The color turquoise is derived from blue but also surpasses blue.” At three years old, I learned from my parents this Chinese idiom that is meant to spur me on to live a life better than theirs. But ironically, ever since I studied abroad and exposed myself to the diversity of world cultures, I felt that I was increasingly torn away from my parents. In my case, the color turquoise was not just derived from blue; it had become a completely different color. In Wei-Lai, we see a Chinese immigrant boy trying to get adopted by a white American family; but really, this is a story about a displaced Chinese culture seeking adoption in the new American homeland. Being uprooted from the geopolitical center of our home cultures, we are, just like Wei-Lai, seeking “adoption” in a formidable new country. Yet, the process of finding the new “home” almost inevitably comes with a sacrifice. Wei-Lai’s story is a story about hurting in the process of finding love: the parents discipline him physically with their old practices, and, to retaliate, he wounds them emotionally. But with time, they all grow up to become better versions of themselves, recognizing what makes them a family and accepting the imperfections of their love for each other.As life is full of laughs and pains, in this movie, we used laughs to look at pains. The pains of not knowing the grammar of love to speak to our father’s generation, and it always broke our hearts when we ended up hurting each other. And more than anyone, I made this film to speak to my own father. At a time when the Asian American community is attacked more than ever, I also hope to use this film as a call for our community’s self-healing, self-love, and self-acceptance. Our cultures, identities, and selfhood do not exist in the ways other people look at us; they exist in each of our own hearts.

Wei-Lai

Siyi, a Chinese student in an American theater school, has been putting in more effort than her American peers to practice for the first role she gets in college. Yet her professor is rescinding the offer because of her accent. To win back the opportunity for the closing night, Siyi determines to rid her accent by speaking English only from now on, even when she video chats with her mom. As she grows obsessed with the accent practices, Siyi’s attempt to better her craft has shifted into the faltering of her identity. Director Biography -&nbsp;Shicong Zhu<a href="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-storage.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/001/931/536/original/b64e4f200f-headshot.jpg?1635357281" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><img src="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-storage.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/001/931/536/thumb/b64e4f200f-headshot.jpg?1635357281" style="border: none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle; display: block; height: auto; max-width: 100%; position: relative;" width="158"></a>Shicong Zhu is a Chinese filmmaker based in Los Angeles, CA and Beijing, China. Her works have been selected to screen at LA Short Fest, International Foyle Film Festival, Fantasia Film Festival, Bolton Film Festival, the 44th Asian American International Film Festival and so forth. She graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she was an honoree and recipient of the 2020 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant. Director StatementWhen Ella Rouwen Chen (Siyi) presented me with the story inspired by her experience as one of the few ESL (English as a Second Language) students in a prestigious theater school in LA, I immediately felt a personal connection to it. Soon after, I found out that I was not alone. Along the way of making de closin night, every step we took, we encountered people from all kinds of diaspora telling us how they resonate with the protagonist Siyi’s experience. The immigrant experience in the U.S. is so vast yet so specific. It can be so intense, yet so subtly overlooked as merely “minor feelings.” And I feel honored to direct Ella’s story, to present a razor-focused moment in Siyi’s life that has a significant, universal resonance. At its core, de closin night is about a first-generation immigrant in America who tries very hard to assimilate into the culture, to the point that she risks eliminating her own history. It is also about an actor determined to improve her techniques at the expense of her personal relations. Finally, it is about an invisible bond through shared culture and family history, grounding Siyi through loss and grief and reminding her of her origins.

De closin night

Profile of Indian-American artist and sculptor Rina Banerjee. Director Biography -&nbsp;Kuang Lee<a href="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-storage.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/140/563/original/a10a1948c9-headshot.jpg?1659049743" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><img src="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-storage.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/140/563/thumb/a10a1948c9-headshot.jpg?1659049743" style="border: none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle; display: block; height: auto; max-width: 100%; position: relative;" width="147"></a>Kuang Lee is a writer and filmmaker living in Oakland, California. He is the founder of Satellite Films, an Addy Award winning production studio specializing in brand films and documentaries.

Rina Banerjee in her Studio

“Seek” is about a woman named Sam, whose husband died in an accident years ago. Suffering from the pain, she drowns himself in sorrow until one day she meets a man who oddly renews her passion and makes her heart beat a bit faster. In pursuit of this man, she discovers that he was the recipient of her late husband’s heart. Director -&nbsp;Mong Vang <a href="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-storage.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/117/092/original/2860407811-headshot.jpg?1657206795" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><img src="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-storage.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/117/092/thumb/2860407811-headshot.jpg?1657206795" style="border: none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle; display: block; height: auto; max-width: 100%; position: relative;" width="163"></a> Mong Vang is&nbsp;an award-winning filmmaker&nbsp;based in Minneapolis, MN.&nbsp;He has&nbsp;a decade of experience in content creation and has worked with hundreds of clients.&nbsp;His YouTube channel has over a million organic views and over five million minutes of watch time.&nbsp;Drawing on personal, observational, and archival practices, he makes films that explore intergenerational memory, carceral landscapes, and the relationship between place and identity. His work has been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and he is a 2021 Bush Fellowship finalist.&nbsp;He holds&nbsp;a BFA in Filmmaking from the Minneapolis College of Arts and Design. When working as a film director, he enjoys spending quality time with his children.

Seek

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