A Funeral Procession of Fireflies
Fuzhou, China | Film Feature
Drama
In 1990s rural Fuzhou, two sisters wait for a boat to their mother in the U.S. Only one will board. Drawn from my own childhood, raised by relatives I called my parents in Fuzhou, China. This is a ghost story about a girl who grows old waiting to forgive a mother she can barely remember.
46 supporters | followers
Enter the amount you would like to pledge
$15,493
Goal: $15,000 for production
In 1990s rural Fuzhou, two sisters wait for a boat to their mother in the U.S. Only one will board. Drawn from my own childhood, raised by relatives I called my parents in Fuzhou, China. This is a ghost story about a girl who grows old waiting to forgive a mother she can barely remember.
Participating In
About The Project
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
🧚 This campaign is available in Chinese — click here for the translation! / 本次活动的简体中文版已上线，点击此处查看！
I was born in the United States and sent to Fuzhou, China, as a baby. For five years, my great-uncle and great-aunt raised me. They were the people I called my parents. My real mother and father existed only as distant presences—voices on the phone, money in the mail, a feeling of being watched from somewhere I couldn't see.
Children like me are called "satellite babies." It is a long-standing practice in the Fuzhounese diaspora: parents work overseas while their children are sent back to China to be raised by relatives. When I returned to my parents at age five, I arrived in a country I didn't remember, to a family I didn't recognize.
Seventeen years later, I went back to Fuzhou. I lived again with my great-uncle and great-aunt on the same old street, not yet demolished for high-rises. Slowly, things returned—the sound of firecrackers, the smell of frying snacks, the cadence of the Fuzhounese dialect I had lost as a child. I began interviewing other satellite children. One described his absent parents as spirits—protective when he behaved, punishing when he didn't. I remembered that feeling.
A Funeral Procession of Fireflies began there.
🧚 Cynthia Lin
Writer/Director
A Funeral Procession of Fireflies is a magical realist drama set in 1990s rural Fuzhou, China.
On the eve of the Qingming Festival, thirteen-year-old Jing and her six-year-old sister Ling wait with their Uncle Wei for a smuggler's boat that will carry them to their mother in the United States—a mother Jing fears no longer wants them, and whom Ling barely remembers.
In their family's old wooden house, the ghost of their grandmother appears to Jing, guiding her through the first confusing steps of girlhood. As the boat repeatedly fails to arrive and tensions sharpen, Jing slips away to the mountain graves to burn spirit money for her grandmother. There, she is bitten by a snake. When the boat finally comes, only Ling and Uncle Wei board. Jing is left behind.
What we're making now is Part 1 of a feature film. This chapter follows Jing through her first encounter with loss, a complete story that stands on its own. But it's also the beginning of a larger narrative that will follow Jing and Ling across decades, from childhood in Fuzhou to adulthood in America. Making Part 1 now allows us to prove the world, the tone, and the story while building momentum toward the full feature.
Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating after the 1986 U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act, undocumented emigration from rural Fuzhou transformed an entire region. American-style mansions rose beside ancestral homes. Villages emptied. Children cycled between continents. New York neighborhoods like Flushing, Chinatown, and Sunset Park were built on Fuzhounese labor and longing. Yet almost nothing exists on screen about this community—not in its own dialect, and not from the perspective of the children left behind.
This story has been carried in silence for decades. Help us give it a screen.
Our film evokes the atmospheric childhood wonder of Victor Erice's directorial debut The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), filtering the political through a child's gaze, with the quiet visual meditation on mourning in Kore-eda's debut Maborosi (1995). Like Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000), our film is a meditation on family, memory, and the things we carry that no one else can see.
Woven throughout are archival 8mm reels and photographs taken by American missionaries—images filtered through a foreign gaze that trace Western presence in Fuzhou back to the Opium Wars and the opening of treaty ports. These fragments of the past haunt the present, evoking how history lingers beneath the surface of everyday life.
JING (13) The quiet, watchful older sister, mature beyond her years. She stands at the threshold of womanhood, caught between the ghost of her grandmother and the absence of her mother, responsible for a younger sister who still believes in magic.
LING (6) The innocent, imaginative younger sister. She exists in a world where spirits are real and mothers can be reached through make-believe. Her memories are fading, replaced by stories and intuition.
UNCLE WEI (40s) The reluctant guardian, thin with grudging responsibility. He is a man caught in an impossible position—caring for his sisters' children while facilitating his own departure, selling their home to fund a future that may not include them.
GRANDMA'S GHOST (80s) A tangible presence woven through the house. She exists in the falling peanut shells, the sway of her old dress, and the breath that joins the living at night.
THE MOTHER (30s) Seen only in black-and-white memory. A woman desperate enough to leave her children to change her ming (fate). She exists for Jing and Ling as a photograph, a signature that looks like a snake, and a promise that may never be kept.
This story grows from real lives in Fuzhou, China—and from the region's folk myths and spiritual traditions. With your help, we can bring this world to life on screen.
We’ve already secured initial funding through Yale University’s Barry Fellowship, the Women Faculty Forum, Film & Media Studies Grant, and Creative and Performing Arts Award. The project was also selected for the Linz Film Talent Academy LAB, where we’ll pitch at the Marché du Film during the 2026 Cannes Film Festival!
This year, we are also participating in Seed&Spark's AAPI Renaissance Rally—a crowdfunding rally that gives storytellers like us a chance to pitch for funding and mentorship, all while helping reshape the future of Asian/Asian American film. If you believe in this story, please share, follow, and pledge between March 30 and April 29!
This momentum is incredible—but we need your help to cross the finish line. Your contribution will allow us to close the final funding gap and greenlight production in Fuzhou!
🧚 Weijia Zhou
Producer
Here’s exactly how your support builds this film, layer by layer:
Your contributions directly support the most ambitious and technically demanding elements of our production:
🌙 Recreating 1980–1990s Fuzhou
Many of the buildings from 1980s–1990s Fuzhou still stand, but their interiors have been renovated by decades of modernization. To tell this story truthfully, we need to transform these contemporary spaces back into the 1990s. Your support allows us to redress locations with period-accurate furniture, household objects, and source authentic paper spirit houses and spirit money modeled on U.S. currency.
🌀 Filming on Open Water
The boat at the center of our story represents the clandestine journeys and smuggling routes that transformed a generation. To capture the fear and fragile hope of departure, we will film on open water using a period-modified vessel. This sequence requires extensive safety planning, maritime coordination, permits, and specialized crew. Your support ensures we can bring this crucial sequence to life with realism and respect.
🕸️ Rendering the Ghostly
In our film, the supernatural is not fantasy. It reflects the lingering presence of unresolved histories and inherited trauma. The past is never fully gone; it lives quietly within the present. To capture these ghostly traces with subtlety and care, we require high-quality camera and lighting equipment capable of holding delicate detail, from grandmother’s spirit to the fragile glow of a firefly at dusk.
✨ A Fuzhounese Cast
This story belongs to the families shaped by migration—those who left and those who stayed. We are casting non-professional actors from Fuzhounese-speaking communities to preserve the rhythms, silences, and textures of lived experience. Your support sustains our local casting efforts and crew, allowing us to collaborate directly with the communities whose histories of absence and resilience form the heart of this film.
January – April 2026 Pre-Production & Fieldwork
Finalizing all preparations before filming: location scouting, script revisions, and translation work, crew call.
May 2026 Cannes Pitch
Pitching A Funeral Procession of Fireflies to international industry partners at the Marché du Film, Cannes Film Festival.
June – September 2026 Casting & Logistics
Casting within Fuzhounese-speaking communities, rehearsals, technical preparations, production design and art departments, etc.
October 2026 Principal Photography
14-day shoot on location in rural Fuzhou.
November 2026 – April 2027 Post-Production
Editing, sound design, and color correction.
June 2027 *Phase 2 Pre-Production Begins*
With Part 1 complete, we begin the next chapter. The footage, relationships, and creative foundation we've built will carry us forward as we develop the full feature, following Jing and Ling from Fuzhou to New York City and back again.
Our initial $15,000 goal covers locations, equipment, and on-set support. If we go beyond that, every additional dollar deepens the film's reach!
$20,000 – Post-Production
Complete the film with care and precision:
- Professional color grading to deepen forest greens, shape dusk shadows, and capture the glow of burning paper offerings
- Sound design layering wind, breath, and crackling peanut shells to build a living, breathing landscape
$25,000 – Local Screenings
Return the film to New York's Chinese neighborhoods, where these stories began:
- Screenings with schools, senior centers, and local partners
- Intergenerational conversations about migration history and the "satellite baby" experience
$30,000 – International Film Festivals
Bring this Fuzhounese-American story to the world:
- Festival submission fees, travel and outreach to arthouse and diaspora audiences internationally
- From the festival circuit, we will seek distribution pathways that carry this story back to its communities
- We hope to use cinema’s transnational infrastructure to reimagine Fuzhounese identity and create new encounters across borders
🧚🧚🧚🧚
Hi friends, this is Cynthia writing from Chang'le in Fuzhou.
Thank you thank you thank you for supporting this project!
If you can believe it, this all started almost three years ago in 2023. I went back to China for the first time after 17 years to (re)learn Chinese in Beijing, and then decided to visit my parents' hometown...and the place where I grew up for four and a half years as a child.
I'm back in China now, but this time, I have a team that I really believe and trust in, and a mentor (our EP!) who I think of as a second mother/coolest aunt/best older friend and the strongest woman I know.
Take care of yourselves in these scary times.
🧚🧚🧚🧚
Every little bit of support goes a long way! If you can't give financially, you can still be part of bringing this story to life. Here are a few ways to help:
Follow us on Seed&Spark!
We need 350 followers by April 29th to qualify for the AAPI Renaissance Rally Gold House Pitch, a chance at funding that could transform this film's future.
Help us reach 350 followers by sharing this with a friend!
🧚 Feel like sharing our campaign? Here's a pre-written message! 🧚
I'm excited to support A FUNERAL PROCESSION OF FIREFLIES, a magical realist drama about the Fuzhounese diaspora told through the eyes of the children left behind. Directed by Fuzhounese American filmmaker Cynthia Lin, this story is told by and for the community, filmed on location in rural Fuzhou with a cast from Fuzhounese-speaking families.
Follow them on Seed&Spark to help them qualify for the AAPI Renaissance Rally Gold Pitch at TIFF, presented by Seed&Spark and Gold House!
🔗 Seed&Spark: https://seedandspark.com/fund/funeral-procession-of-fireflies
...
Graphic Design: Daheun Oh / Photo Credits: Lieko Shiga, Dylan Hausthor, Cynthia Lin / Films Referenced: Moving (1993) dir. Shinji Somai, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) dir. Víctor Erice, Maborosi (1995) dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Yi Yi (2000) dir. Edward Yang, Still Life (2006) dir. Jia Zhangke, Balloon (2019) dir. Pema Tseden, This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (2019) dir. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) dir. Chantal Akerman, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023) dir. Phạm Thiên Ân, Landscape in the Mist (1988) dir. Theo Angelopoulos, Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) dir. Tsai Ming-liang, The Widowed Witch (2017) dir. Cai Chengjie, The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985) dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Nobody Knows (2004) dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Vitalina Varela (2019) dir. Pedro Costa
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Production Design - Recreating 1980-1990s Fuzhou
Costs $4,500
Period furniture and household objects; authentic paper spirit houses and spirit money modeled on U.S. currency; wardrobe and costumes
Filming on Open Water
Costs $4,000
Traditional fishing boat rental; safety planning and maritime coordination; permits and specialized crew for open-water filming
Camera & Lighting - Rendering the Ghostly
Costs $3,500
High-quality camera package with high dynamic range; specialized lighting to hold delicate detail
Supporting our Cast & Crew!
Costs $3,000
Core crew travel and transport; meals and on-site support for our local cast and crew
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Writer/Director
Cynthia Lin is a filmmaker and visual artist exploring diasporic memories from the Chinese rural south. Drawing from her experience as a satellite child raised in Fuzhou until age five, Lin writes elliptical, magical-realist stories where the historical past quietly haunts the present, weaving ghost stories which echo the absence of family. Currently studying film at Yale University, Lin has also trained at FAMU in the Czech Republic, and the International Film and Television School (EICTV) in Cuba. She was selected for The Gotham EDU’s Film & Media Career Development Program in 2023 and is currently developing her next project through the Linz Film Talent Academy Lab.
Executive Producer
Sahraa Karimi is an Afghan-Slovak film director and screenwriter whose work bridges art, politics, and the lived experiences of women under oppression. Karimi’s filmography includes about 30 short fiction and documentary films that have been screened at numerous international festivals and broadcast by ARTE France, BBC, and Slovak Television. Her documentary Afghan Women Behind the Wheel won over 25 awards worldwide, and her first feature film, Hava, Maryam, Ayesha (2019), premiered in the Orizzonti Competition at the Venice Film Festival and represented Afghanistan at the Academy Awards.
Producer
Weijia Zhou is a New York–based Chinese producer and filmmaker committed to intimate, socially grounded storytelling that illuminates the human experience. She produced and directed her debut short film Away (2020), which screened at numerous festivals, including the Oscar-qualifying Interfilm Berlin. Weijia’s expertise was shaped through program development roles, including internships at Women Make Movies and Chicago Filmmakers, where she gained hands-on experience in independent film incubation, financing, and distribution, which further strengthened her dedication to amplifying underrepresented voices and local stories.
Current Team
Incentives
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
🧚 This campaign is available in Chinese — click here for the translation! / 本次活动的简体中文版已上线，点击此处查看！
I was born in the United States and sent to Fuzhou, China, as a baby. For five years, my great-uncle and great-aunt raised me. They were the people I called my parents. My real mother and father existed only as distant presences—voices on the phone, money in the mail, a feeling of being watched from somewhere I couldn't see.
Children like me are called "satellite babies." It is a long-standing practice in the Fuzhounese diaspora: parents work overseas while their children are sent back to China to be raised by relatives. When I returned to my parents at age five, I arrived in a country I didn't remember, to a family I didn't recognize.
Seventeen years later, I went back to Fuzhou. I lived again with my great-uncle and great-aunt on the same old street, not yet demolished for high-rises. Slowly, things returned—the sound of firecrackers, the smell of frying snacks, the cadence of the Fuzhounese dialect I had lost as a child. I began interviewing other satellite children. One described his absent parents as spirits—protective when he behaved, punishing when he didn't. I remembered that feeling.
A Funeral Procession of Fireflies began there.
🧚 Cynthia Lin
Writer/Director
A Funeral Procession of Fireflies is a magical realist drama set in 1990s rural Fuzhou, China.
On the eve of the Qingming Festival, thirteen-year-old Jing and her six-year-old sister Ling wait with their Uncle Wei for a smuggler's boat that will carry them to their mother in the United States—a mother Jing fears no longer wants them, and whom Ling barely remembers.
In their family's old wooden house, the ghost of their grandmother appears to Jing, guiding her through the first confusing steps of girlhood. As the boat repeatedly fails to arrive and tensions sharpen, Jing slips away to the mountain graves to burn spirit money for her grandmother. There, she is bitten by a snake. When the boat finally comes, only Ling and Uncle Wei board. Jing is left behind.
What we're making now is Part 1 of a feature film. This chapter follows Jing through her first encounter with loss, a complete story that stands on its own. But it's also the beginning of a larger narrative that will follow Jing and Ling across decades, from childhood in Fuzhou to adulthood in America. Making Part 1 now allows us to prove the world, the tone, and the story while building momentum toward the full feature.
Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating after the 1986 U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act, undocumented emigration from rural Fuzhou transformed an entire region. American-style mansions rose beside ancestral homes. Villages emptied. Children cycled between continents. New York neighborhoods like Flushing, Chinatown, and Sunset Park were built on Fuzhounese labor and longing. Yet almost nothing exists on screen about this community—not in its own dialect, and not from the perspective of the children left behind.
This story has been carried in silence for decades. Help us give it a screen.
Our film evokes the atmospheric childhood wonder of Victor Erice's directorial debut The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), filtering the political through a child's gaze, with the quiet visual meditation on mourning in Kore-eda's debut Maborosi (1995). Like Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000), our film is a meditation on family, memory, and the things we carry that no one else can see.
Woven throughout are archival 8mm reels and photographs taken by American missionaries—images filtered through a foreign gaze that trace Western presence in Fuzhou back to the Opium Wars and the opening of treaty ports. These fragments of the past haunt the present, evoking how history lingers beneath the surface of everyday life.
JING (13) The quiet, watchful older sister, mature beyond her years. She stands at the threshold of womanhood, caught between the ghost of her grandmother and the absence of her mother, responsible for a younger sister who still believes in magic.
LING (6) The innocent, imaginative younger sister. She exists in a world where spirits are real and mothers can be reached through make-believe. Her memories are fading, replaced by stories and intuition.
UNCLE WEI (40s) The reluctant guardian, thin with grudging responsibility. He is a man caught in an impossible position—caring for his sisters' children while facilitating his own departure, selling their home to fund a future that may not include them.
GRANDMA'S GHOST (80s) A tangible presence woven through the house. She exists in the falling peanut shells, the sway of her old dress, and the breath that joins the living at night.
THE MOTHER (30s) Seen only in black-and-white memory. A woman desperate enough to leave her children to change her ming (fate). She exists for Jing and Ling as a photograph, a signature that looks like a snake, and a promise that may never be kept.
This story grows from real lives in Fuzhou, China—and from the region's folk myths and spiritual traditions. With your help, we can bring this world to life on screen.
We’ve already secured initial funding through Yale University’s Barry Fellowship, the Women Faculty Forum, Film & Media Studies Grant, and Creative and Performing Arts Award. The project was also selected for the Linz Film Talent Academy LAB, where we’ll pitch at the Marché du Film during the 2026 Cannes Film Festival!
This year, we are also participating in Seed&Spark's AAPI Renaissance Rally—a crowdfunding rally that gives storytellers like us a chance to pitch for funding and mentorship, all while helping reshape the future of Asian/Asian American film. If you believe in this story, please share, follow, and pledge between March 30 and April 29!
This momentum is incredible—but we need your help to cross the finish line. Your contribution will allow us to close the final funding gap and greenlight production in Fuzhou!
🧚 Weijia Zhou
Producer
Here’s exactly how your support builds this film, layer by layer:
Your contributions directly support the most ambitious and technically demanding elements of our production:
🌙 Recreating 1980–1990s Fuzhou
Many of the buildings from 1980s–1990s Fuzhou still stand, but their interiors have been renovated by decades of modernization. To tell this story truthfully, we need to transform these contemporary spaces back into the 1990s. Your support allows us to redress locations with period-accurate furniture, household objects, and source authentic paper spirit houses and spirit money modeled on U.S. currency.
🌀 Filming on Open Water
The boat at the center of our story represents the clandestine journeys and smuggling routes that transformed a generation. To capture the fear and fragile hope of departure, we will film on open water using a period-modified vessel. This sequence requires extensive safety planning, maritime coordination, permits, and specialized crew. Your support ensures we can bring this crucial sequence to life with realism and respect.
🕸️ Rendering the Ghostly
In our film, the supernatural is not fantasy. It reflects the lingering presence of unresolved histories and inherited trauma. The past is never fully gone; it lives quietly within the present. To capture these ghostly traces with subtlety and care, we require high-quality camera and lighting equipment capable of holding delicate detail, from grandmother’s spirit to the fragile glow of a firefly at dusk.
✨ A Fuzhounese Cast
This story belongs to the families shaped by migration—those who left and those who stayed. We are casting non-professional actors from Fuzhounese-speaking communities to preserve the rhythms, silences, and textures of lived experience. Your support sustains our local casting efforts and crew, allowing us to collaborate directly with the communities whose histories of absence and resilience form the heart of this film.
January – April 2026 Pre-Production & Fieldwork
Finalizing all preparations before filming: location scouting, script revisions, and translation work, crew call.
May 2026 Cannes Pitch
Pitching A Funeral Procession of Fireflies to international industry partners at the Marché du Film, Cannes Film Festival.
June – September 2026 Casting & Logistics
Casting within Fuzhounese-speaking communities, rehearsals, technical preparations, production design and art departments, etc.
October 2026 Principal Photography
14-day shoot on location in rural Fuzhou.
November 2026 – April 2027 Post-Production
Editing, sound design, and color correction.
June 2027 *Phase 2 Pre-Production Begins*
With Part 1 complete, we begin the next chapter. The footage, relationships, and creative foundation we've built will carry us forward as we develop the full feature, following Jing and Ling from Fuzhou to New York City and back again.
Our initial $15,000 goal covers locations, equipment, and on-set support. If we go beyond that, every additional dollar deepens the film's reach!
$20,000 – Post-Production
Complete the film with care and precision:
- Professional color grading to deepen forest greens, shape dusk shadows, and capture the glow of burning paper offerings
- Sound design layering wind, breath, and crackling peanut shells to build a living, breathing landscape
$25,000 – Local Screenings
Return the film to New York's Chinese neighborhoods, where these stories began:
- Screenings with schools, senior centers, and local partners
- Intergenerational conversations about migration history and the "satellite baby" experience
$30,000 – International Film Festivals
Bring this Fuzhounese-American story to the world:
- Festival submission fees, travel and outreach to arthouse and diaspora audiences internationally
- From the festival circuit, we will seek distribution pathways that carry this story back to its communities
- We hope to use cinema’s transnational infrastructure to reimagine Fuzhounese identity and create new encounters across borders
🧚🧚🧚🧚
Hi friends, this is Cynthia writing from Chang'le in Fuzhou.
Thank you thank you thank you for supporting this project!
If you can believe it, this all started almost three years ago in 2023. I went back to China for the first time after 17 years to (re)learn Chinese in Beijing, and then decided to visit my parents' hometown...and the place where I grew up for four and a half years as a child.
I'm back in China now, but this time, I have a team that I really believe and trust in, and a mentor (our EP!) who I think of as a second mother/coolest aunt/best older friend and the strongest woman I know.
Take care of yourselves in these scary times.
🧚🧚🧚🧚
Every little bit of support goes a long way! If you can't give financially, you can still be part of bringing this story to life. Here are a few ways to help:
Follow us on Seed&Spark!
We need 350 followers by April 29th to qualify for the AAPI Renaissance Rally Gold House Pitch, a chance at funding that could transform this film's future.
Help us reach 350 followers by sharing this with a friend!
🧚 Feel like sharing our campaign? Here's a pre-written message! 🧚
I'm excited to support A FUNERAL PROCESSION OF FIREFLIES, a magical realist drama about the Fuzhounese diaspora told through the eyes of the children left behind. Directed by Fuzhounese American filmmaker Cynthia Lin, this story is told by and for the community, filmed on location in rural Fuzhou with a cast from Fuzhounese-speaking families.
Follow them on Seed&Spark to help them qualify for the AAPI Renaissance Rally Gold Pitch at TIFF, presented by Seed&Spark and Gold House!
🔗 Seed&Spark: https://seedandspark.com/fund/funeral-procession-of-fireflies
...
Graphic Design: Daheun Oh / Photo Credits: Lieko Shiga, Dylan Hausthor, Cynthia Lin / Films Referenced: Moving (1993) dir. Shinji Somai, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) dir. Víctor Erice, Maborosi (1995) dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Yi Yi (2000) dir. Edward Yang, Still Life (2006) dir. Jia Zhangke, Balloon (2019) dir. Pema Tseden, This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (2019) dir. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) dir. Chantal Akerman, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023) dir. Phạm Thiên Ân, Landscape in the Mist (1988) dir. Theo Angelopoulos, Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) dir. Tsai Ming-liang, The Widowed Witch (2017) dir. Cai Chengjie, The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985) dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Nobody Knows (2004) dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Vitalina Varela (2019) dir. Pedro Costa
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Production Design - Recreating 1980-1990s Fuzhou
Costs $4,500
Period furniture and household objects; authentic paper spirit houses and spirit money modeled on U.S. currency; wardrobe and costumes
Filming on Open Water
Costs $4,000
Traditional fishing boat rental; safety planning and maritime coordination; permits and specialized crew for open-water filming
Camera & Lighting - Rendering the Ghostly
Costs $3,500
High-quality camera package with high dynamic range; specialized lighting to hold delicate detail
Supporting our Cast & Crew!
Costs $3,000
Core crew travel and transport; meals and on-site support for our local cast and crew
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Writer/Director
Cynthia Lin is a filmmaker and visual artist exploring diasporic memories from the Chinese rural south. Drawing from her experience as a satellite child raised in Fuzhou until age five, Lin writes elliptical, magical-realist stories where the historical past quietly haunts the present, weaving ghost stories which echo the absence of family. Currently studying film at Yale University, Lin has also trained at FAMU in the Czech Republic, and the International Film and Television School (EICTV) in Cuba. She was selected for The Gotham EDU’s Film & Media Career Development Program in 2023 and is currently developing her next project through the Linz Film Talent Academy Lab.
Executive Producer
Sahraa Karimi is an Afghan-Slovak film director and screenwriter whose work bridges art, politics, and the lived experiences of women under oppression. Karimi’s filmography includes about 30 short fiction and documentary films that have been screened at numerous international festivals and broadcast by ARTE France, BBC, and Slovak Television. Her documentary Afghan Women Behind the Wheel won over 25 awards worldwide, and her first feature film, Hava, Maryam, Ayesha (2019), premiered in the Orizzonti Competition at the Venice Film Festival and represented Afghanistan at the Academy Awards.
Producer
Weijia Zhou is a New York–based Chinese producer and filmmaker committed to intimate, socially grounded storytelling that illuminates the human experience. She produced and directed her debut short film Away (2020), which screened at numerous festivals, including the Oscar-qualifying Interfilm Berlin. Weijia’s expertise was shaped through program development roles, including internships at Women Make Movies and Chicago Filmmakers, where she gained hands-on experience in independent film incubation, financing, and distribution, which further strengthened her dedication to amplifying underrepresented voices and local stories.