Currnently, Asian-American stories are becoming mainstream with main releases like Crazy Rich Asians and Searching, being distributed by major studios. HBO is providing a platform to cultivate the next generation of Asian-American Filmmakers and we want to take advantage of such an opportunity to ensure that this isn’t just a passing trend but an opportunity to establish the presence of Asian-American voices in the industry.

We're making this short film to enter to the HBO APA Visionaries contest, which is an opportunity for Asian American Filmmakers to showcase their work. The theme of the 2018 contest is to explore life in today's digital, Information Age from the unique perspective of an Asian American storyteller. 

In this comedy, Grace's wild daydreams will reveal what she believes is the backstory to her grandmother's secret love life. These fantastical daydreams will be inspired by famous asian film styles made popular by Kurusowa, Wong Kar-Wai, and traditional Korean Drama. This will be our way to unravel the story while paying homage to great asian filmmakers in the process. 

 Akira Kurosawa

 Wong Kar-Wai

 Korean Drama

CHRISTINA

Christina is a Korean–American director, writer and actor working in a variety of mediums including fiction, documentaries, theatre and music video. Her films have been screened and awarded at multiple film festivals including HBO's Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival and CAAMFest. She has also assistant directed for Center Theatre Group and East West Players. Most recently, Christina co-directed Samir, a feature funded by Warner Bros Studios and produced by Elysium Bandini and USC. As an actor, she has worked with Miami Theatre Center and the Goodman Theatre (Chicago), among others. She has also been the face of several national commercial campaigns. She is a proud member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors’ Equity.   Christina has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a graduate of Yale University’s directing lab and an MFA from USC with an emphasis in directing and screenwriting. www.ChristinaYRJun.com

ELISA

Elisa Oh is a writer, director, illustrator and comic-creator whose work features authentic stories about underrepresented, queer, Korean-American characters. The eldest child of a preacher, Elisa grew up poised to follow in the family business, graduating from UC San Diego with a BA in Philosophy and then from Fuller Theological Seminary with her Masters in Divinity. After parting ways with the Church, she decided to perhaps accrue student loan debt professionally and chose to study at the University of Southern California, where she received an MFA in Film and Television Production, with an emphasis in screenwriting. She is also a 2018 Sundance New Voices fellow, which is something she’s had to explain as being very prestigious to all of her Korean aunties who are worried about her choice to be an unwed artist.

GRACE

Korean-American millennial who’s looking to “find herself” like it’s 1998. She’s hyper aware that she feels a little amorphous in her own skin, and she tries to compensate by articulating every feeling she has. She’s philosophically aligned to the school of thought that a person is made up of stories, and that those stories should be turned into a podcast to share with the world. Because of this, she’s looking to learn more about her Korean heritage by tapping into her grandmother’s stories, hoping that somehow, they help shape her into a whole, self-possessed strong human person.

BETHANY

Girl from the Pacific Northwest, self-described “woke” and is still reeling from learning that she is not 1/16th Cherokee, as it has been communicated to her ever since she received baby’s first Pendleton blanket. She’s got strange rapid-fire charisma that borrows from such a spectrum of trends that it’s entirely her own style. She’s the best hype man Grace never asked for, who wishes to be her Sherpa through the windy road of self-discovery and also crafting that road into a podcast.

I (Elisa) bought my Korean grandma a 23+me kit for her 80th birthday because I thought it would be sweet and because I didn’t anticipate the shitstorm response I would get from all of my aunties. Korean American families have a ton of secrets they are not trying to fuck with, so a family history search is a serious threat. My theory about Asian American invisibility in the media is that it is intentional and entirely orchestrated by the first generation to maintain all of our dark family secrets.

Our goal as Asian American filmmakers is to fight the first generation by researching our personal family histories and putting it on screen for everybody to see. And then inviting all of our aunties to watch with us and force them to maybe someday be proud to be interesting and broken and the kind of people whose story you’d want to tell. We also want them to be proud to be related to us, so we are looking to do our very best to make it super profesh. Join us in our fight against the first generation Asian secret keepers and help us get these stories told.

The funds we raise will go directly toward production costs such as travel expenses, rentals, locations and post production costs. Since this involves genre-blending, one of our largest expenses will be recreating these locations and time periods with accuracy. Here is a general breakdown of our budget:  

Look at our Wishlist to see where specifically we need your help on this production.