Witness stunning animation in a variety of mediums and styles. These stories by and about Asian Americans use the art of animation to convey deep emotional themes. Creativity comes to life here in the form of 2D, 3D, and stop motion short films. This screening features 10 films. Toggle between film descriptions by scrolling and clicking on the buttons on the top right.

A joyous, animated, Bollywood-style music video about two Indian women who fall in love during a dance. Director Biography -&nbsp;Nimisha Sanjeevani-Chandrashekhar Mahatme<img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/2fd62016939f4692065fddf1b89ccc32.jpg" width="203" style="display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px;">Nimisha Mahatme is a Bay Area visual development artist working to be in film and television. She enjoys creating characters and stories behind them! She loves having characters that range from different diversities, cultures, and sexualities. In her free time, she loves makeup and fashion, rewatching her favorite shows again and again, learning about true crime stories and social issues, and hanging out with friends. Director Statement﻿I wanted to create this film to share a message for anyone who struggles to connect with their culture in a traditional sense. I feel that there are many ways we can express our unique voices within our community, like how I found a sense of belonging in my Marathi culture through my own interests in dance and music. And As a queer Indian-American, I wanted to showcase intersectional representation for LGBTQ+ people of color because I want others to see themselves represented through media in a way that I wish I had growing up.

Dancing Dhamaal!

Unexpected help comes to a family of cats struggling with their finances at Christmas time. Director Biography -&nbsp;Cameryn Koike<a href="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-connector.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/615/637/original/8b5c4d034e-headshot.jpg?1721293660" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><img src="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-connector.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/615/637/thumb/8b5c4d034e-headshot.jpg?1721293660" width="150" style="border: none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size-adjust: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-size: 12.95px; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle; display: inline; height: auto; max-width: 100%; position: relative; float: left;"></a>Cameryn Koike is a junior at Mid-Pacific Institute and prolific animator. Her passion is writing and animating adorable and engaging characters.

Christmas Lights

Follow Junho Kim, born and raised as a mixed-race child after the Korean War, as he recounts his feelings of displacement and his longing for the American soldier father he never knew. The animation poetically brings Kim's words to life, translating his emotional journey into a visual narrative. Director Biography -&nbsp;Sujin Kim <a href="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-connector.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/848/069/original/e73d657c19-headshot.jpg?1722539044" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><img src="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-connector.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/848/069/thumb/e73d657c19-headshot.jpg?1722539044" width="128" style="border: none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size-adjust: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle; display: inline; height: auto; max-width: 100%; position: relative; float: left;"></a>Sujin Kim is an experimental filmmaker. Kim employs a poetic approach to moving image making within the realm of documentary animated filmmaking. She received the Gold Medal in Animation at the 49th Student Academy Awards. Her films have been showcased at prestigious international festivals, including the Oscar-qualifying Ann Arbor Film Festival, RiverRun International Film Festival, and Annecy International Animated Film Festival. Her work is preserved in esteemed archives such as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in the U.S. and the War and Women Human Rights Museum in South Korea.

Whispers of Colors

Set in a futuristic city, follow the story of Tai, who lives a disheartened life far from his home on Rapa Nui. One day, while at his desk, Tai looks at pictures of his childhood on the island and sees the farewell necklace he received in Rapa Nui. Overcome with nostalgia, he decides to immerse himself in virtual reality to relive his childhood memories. Director Biography - Loreto Vaikapua Gómez CamposLoreto Vaikapua Gómez Campos was born on October 26, 2002, in Hanga Roa, Rapa Nui, Chile. From 2008 to 2010, she lived in Wellington, New Zealand. She is currently a fourth-year animation student at Universidad Mayor in Santiago, Chile, where she also resides. In 2023 and 2024, she received nominations at the international animation festival “Chilemonos” for her short films “Estaré Siempre Contigo” and “Ngau Kahua,” the latter of which received an honorable mention in the national student short films category.

Ngau Kahua

A 3D animated short film about a mechanic, her robot companion, and the path they take to reconnect their relationship. Director Biography -&nbsp;Kristina Tran <a href="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-connector.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/786/999/original/8f3b17aba8-headshot.jpg?1716785170" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><img src="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-connector.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/786/999/thumb/8f3b17aba8-headshot.jpg?1716785170" width="171" style="border: none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size-adjust: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle; display: inline; height: auto; max-width: 100%; position: relative; float: left;"></a>Kristina Tran is a Vietnamese- and Chinese-American filmmaker from Elk Grove, California. She attended San Jose State University for her BFA in Animation/Illustration and graduated in 2024. "re:connection" is her final thesis film, which was completed as part of her degree. Her passions include creating lived-in 3D environments, dramatic lighting, render wrangling, and eating at Home Eat with her team. Director Statement"re:connection" was first conceived when I reflected on my experience with balancing work and life in a past relationship. However, the story evolved as I shared it with each member of my team. Each person I spoke to saw something different in the characters we were creating; to some, the Mechanic and the Robot represented a tumultuous but forgiving sibling relationship. To others, the characters embodied their struggles with a decline in mental health and the loss of childhood.I realized that our simple story represented more than my original relationship issues and embraced every new and different emotion our team brought to the table. Now, the final form of our film hopes to inspire viewers to reflect on their own relationships. Even if your bonds with your loved ones have changed, you can take the first step to reconnect.

re:connection

A young girl memorializes her late grandfather by attempting to obtain his favorite fruit, receiving unexpected aid from magical visitors in the process.&nbsp; Director Biographies –&nbsp;Thy Vo, Ivan Gozali, Yuzra Shahid, Florence Young, Noël Wiggins, Tracy Liu <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/440bfba17d4d995e2e87411b34799d59.jpg" width="129" style="display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px;"> ﻿Thy Vo:Thy is a 2D generalist animator that’s animated for series, commercial, and interactive works. Some clients she’s made work for include Cartoon Network, adult swim, and PBS Kids. Born in Brooklyn, but raised in Lawrenceville, Thy has always loved making videos and art, but really got into animation because it bridged the language gap she had with her family. Currently, some of her favorite subjects revolve around culture, music, fashion, anime, and gaming. Her current obsessions are Dungeon Meshi, Stardew Valley, and Tears of the Kingdom. Outside of art, she enjoys the gym, her pups, and cooking. She loves meeting new people, collaborating, and making something fun everyone will enjoy making and watching. Ivan Gozali:Ivan is a Chinese-Indonesian LA-based filmmaker; a story artist working in the animation industry since 2010. He's worked on a myriad of projects such as Guillermo Del Toro's Tales of Arcadia series, Paul McCartney's High in the Clouds, Lauren Faust's fun spin-off of DC Superhero Girls, with clients such as Disney, DreamWorks, Netflix, Warner Bros., ShadowMachine, Duncan Studios, and others. His passion is great cinema! He's interested in working on features or limited series that are boundary pushing--in stories, styles and genres; and especially in projects with high social impact, exploring humanitarian values, and a belief in making a difference. Yusra Shahid:Yusra is an Indian background and visual development artist for animation. Having grown up in Kuala Lumpur and lived in Melbourne and London, she is now stationed in sunny Los Angeles. Yusra has worked for animated tv shows and feature films for clients like A24, Disney TVA, Nickelodeon, Titmouse, Atomic Cartoons and more. She loves to tell the stories from her own culture and the ones she’s experienced around her while growing up through her art. When not drawing, you can find her making pretty earrings and tiny clay pins. Florence Young:Florence is a Chinese-Canadian artist who works in the video games, film, and animation industries. Having grown up with a Chinese-Cambodian father who enjoys sharing his love of stories and cultures that he grew up with, Flo developed a passion for learning asian history along with their myths and legends. She also loves noodles, anime, and martial arts movies. She now lives in Massachusetts with her partner and bearded dragon. Flo has worked on projects published by Ubisoft, Warner Brothers, Nelvana, Disney XD, Nickelodeon, and Dungeon Masters Guild. She continues to create characters and environments steeped with story and charm taking inspiration from her own heritage. In her spare time, Flo is working on writing and illustrating her own manga as well as developing an indie game. Noël Wiggins:Noël is a comedy writer, animatic editor, voice actor, and voted most likely to wear too many hats. Born a military brat in the Philippines, Noël spent most of his childhood moving from military base to base and living in his imagination rather than making actual friends. Luckily for him, this would foster his creative journey and love of storytelling. He writes comedies about diverse misfits who fight to break away from tradition in order to rewrite their own stories and he has over five years of experience writing, directing, or editing animated web series such as Red vs Blue: Family Shatters, Human Beans, and Paula and Pals. Noël is an avid sneakerhead that can be described as if every wacky ‘90s toy commercial was a person. Tracy Liu:Tracy Liu is a Chinese-American self-taught illustrator specializing in animation and game production. After pursuing degrees in Ecology, Motion Graphics, and Museum Studies, Tracy began her career in museum exhibits and public programming. She honed her skills at a design firm, specializing in interactive exhibits, before transitioning to Nickelodeon, where she became an Associate Producer creating interactive videos as well as an Emmy-nominated series for their preschool app Noggin. Currently, she's taking Warrior Art Camp's 2024 Animated Short Film Making course.Raised in NYC by a history professor mom and composer dad, Tracy's passion for painting, comics, and storytelling is inspired by documentaries, European and Asian animation, and Chinese wuxia dramas. Her favorite subjects are wildlife, mythology, and exploration of nature and the hidden depths of humanity. Beyond art, she enjoys reading epic fantasy novels, horseback riding, birdwatching, wildlife rehabilitation, and playing indie games.

bé hồng  (little persimmon)

An orphan teen struggles to care for his younger brother in this cutting-edge experimental multi-media short film. Lego stop-motion, live-action, and 2D animation meld to create stunning effects.&nbsp; Director Biography -&nbsp;Pono Wong<a href="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-connector.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/615/674/original/30e01bc095-headshot.jpg?1706520691" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><img src="https://filmfreeway-production-storage-01-connector.filmfreeway.com/press_kits/headshots/002/615/674/thumb/30e01bc095-headshot.jpg?1706520691" width="150" style="border: none; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size-adjust: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-size: 12.95px; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle; display: inline; height: auto; max-width: 100%; position: relative; float: left;"></a>Pono Wong is a mixed-race Native Hawaiian/Asian high school freshman and prolific animator, filmmaker, writer, and actor. His unique style of mixing stop-motion, live-action, and 2D animation creates stunning effects. He grew up on Oahu, Hawai'i and has been creating stop-motion films since he was a young elementary school student. His knack for creating sympathetic characters shows his deep understanding of the human condition. His films "DUSK" and "ABRASIAN" were selected as Official Selections at the Hollywood Youth Diversity Film Festival. "DUSK" was also selected as an Official Selection at the Hawai'i International Film Festival's Inaugural 'Ōpio Youth Fest.

DUSK

Through artful animation, a solo road trip--with valleys, junctions, and detours--becomes a healing meditation across place and time.&nbsp; Director Biography -&nbsp;Esther Cheung<img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/5e21d30faf18f586dd8d5bb912a12f89.jpg" width="204" style="display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px;">Esther Cheung is a filmmaker and director from Toronto, Canada. Her directorial debut, In Passing, is an award-winning short that screened in over fifty festivals worldwide. She obtained a Bachelor of Animation Arts from Sheridan College in 2019, and a Master of Journalism from the University of British Columbia in 2023.She is known for her poetic approach to story and is inspired by her relationship with place, often using elements of autoethnography and metaphor in her work. She tests personal limitations in her artistic practice by expanding the possibilities of non-narrative storytelling and animation.Currently based in Vancouver, she is working on the animated feature, Tangles. Director Statement﻿Three years ago, I drove across the country...twice. Covering five thousand kilometres each way, I explored the vast country I call home retracing childhood roadtrips while finding new paths to roam. Detours Ahead is rooted in that journey.

Detours Ahead

An ancient poem is brilliantly re-imagined through the art of papercutting and stop-motion animation. Director Biography -&nbsp;Samhita Sunya<img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/39dde056f294d6bef4739f9ffca94166.jpg" width="197" style="display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px;">Samhita Sunya comes to filmmaking by way of her career as a film historian. She is currently an Associate Professor of Cinema in the Department of Middle Eastern &amp; South Asian Languages &amp; Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of SIRENS OF MODERNITY: WORLD CINEMA VIA BOMBAY (University of California Press, 2022), which is an account of the widespread, international popularity of Hindi song-dance films during the Cold War-era 1960s. Raised in Houston, Texas by South Asian immigrant parents, she has lived and worked in India, Lebanon, and Turkey. Her scholarship has been praised for its "rare... vulnerability," for its focus on histories of love and cinephilia, and for the transregional and global dimensions of its historical research. Her first short film, CONFERENCE OF THE MOTHS (2024), draws on her familiarity with an array of artistic, literary, and cinematic genealogies of poetry and visual culture across South/West Asia. Her film, like her scholarship, is driven by a conviction that these genealogies and stories have so much to offer contemporary filmmakers, as we seek to render not only the world that we live in, but also the world in which we aspire to live. Director StatementCONFERENCE OF THE MOTHS is a film that I co-wrote with my now ex-partner Ali Bandeali, as we worked through the months-long process of a separation that became final. He and I are Pakistani- and Indian-American, respectively. We both grew up in Texas, and we were lucky that our families supported our relationship from the outset: as an Indian-Pakistani romance, many remarked that ours was the stuff of Bollywood movies. So, too, was the fact that when our relationship started to unravel, our mothers’ and aunties’ well-meaning advice was, “Make a baby, it will fix everything!” (Spoiler alert: We did not make a baby.) Instead, we decided to make a film, as a journey—both within the film and outside of it—of learning to love and to let go without fear.On the practical side of setting out to make a film, Ali and I had to also pick through our skills and limitations. We lacked experience with directing actors, recording live sound, or dealing with the intricacies of lighting and makeup. But, we both knew that we wanted to make something zany and magical and heartfelt, that I could make paper puppets, that I could draw on my academic knowledge of South/West Asian literary, musical, and artistic forms, that Ali could compose music and edit, and that we had access to a University camera, a public library’s sound recording studio, and the brilliant novelist Rabih Alameddine’s gorgeous voice. Our script emerged from two conversations that fortuitously coalesced: one, over our shared irritation with the individualist, product-driven rhetoric of care in the contemporary world; and another, over the curious absence of the moth and flame--despite being one of the most iconic motifs of Indo-Persian poetry--from a visual repertoire spanning miniature paintings, textiles, carpets, mosaics, and carvings. It thus feels like nothing short of magic to have made a film for the first time as part of working through the end of a relationship, and to have in the process brought the moth and flame, the Wise Hoopoe from the 12th century Persian epic THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS, and Rabih Alameddine’s voice acting debut to the big screen.

CONFERENCE OF THE MOTHS

A heartfelt dialogue between a mother and her daughter, reflecting on the sacrifices they've made and the dreams they hold dear within their immigrant experience. Director Biography -&nbsp;Clara Chan<img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/2ce6427ece1812ba9440b61d7f781467.jpg" width="214" style="display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px;">Clara Chan has been in the animation/VFX industry for over two decades. She works as a VFX Supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks by day, and as an independent filmmaker by night. She made her first independent short film, “Embrace,” in 2021 which has been screened at different film festivals in Canada and the US. She started Flying Dumpling Films in 2022 because she is passionate about telling unique and authentic stories that connect with people. Clara has lived in mainland China, Hong Kong, California, New York and Texas, and currently resides in Vancouver, Canada. She has a B.S. in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.S. in Visualization Sciences from Texas A&amp;M University. She has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts &amp; Sciences (Short Films and Feature Animation Branch) since 2021. Director StatementThis is a fictional story inspired by my family’s immigration journey. When my parents were teenagers, they left their homes in Vietnam and Cambodia respectively to go to China for free education. I could imagine the big dreams they must have had when they first landed in China. Then life’s journey altered those dreams. After my brother and I were born, my parents decided to leave everything behind to start a new life in Hong Kong. My father worked as a construction worker in Hong Kong instead of utilizing his degree in architecture because his mainland Chinese degree was not recognized in Hong Kong. Life was tough but good until in the 80’s when talks of returning Hong Kong to China started. My parents knew that the meaning of freedom would not be the same once China took over. So once again, we left our home in Hong Kong and immigrated to North America, hoping for a better future. But life as immigrants is full of challenges. Language barrier, economic hardship, racism, to name a few. That made me wonder, is it all worth it? Now that I have two children of my own, I understand the choices and sacrifices a parent has to make for the family. Sometimes I struggle to make those choices. That was when I got inspired to write a poem, showing first the point of view of a daughter, feeling guilty that she has swallowed her mother’s dreams, and then the surprising different point of view of her mother. Animation is the perfect medium because it lets me tell this mother-daughter story in an imaginative and visually interesting way. I believe this film will help light a spark for one to reflect on their relationships with their parents, children or loved ones. Also, by sharing one immigrant family’s experience, I hope to create room for empathy and understanding amongst people.

Have I Swallowed Your Dreams

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