HollyShorts / Catalina Film Festival 2019 – Our Home Here
Parallel stories of broken relationships between parents and their children striving for the American Dream all revolving around one explosive night at a fast-food joint.
Interview with Writer/Director Angela Chen
Watch Our Home Here here:
Congratulations! Why did you make your film?
As a hyphenated first-generation American, I get the privilege of experiencing and observing the pursuit of the American dream and American society through a mixture of lenses. I believe in showcasing different perspectives alongside and outside the mainstream to build empathy and bridge a conversation.
Imagine I’m a member of the audience. Why should I watch this film?
Everyone is someone’s child and we all come from somewhere with a dream or two. Between our birth to our current present day, our paths may have swayed, our dreams may be punctured, and our relationships with our family and personal identity may have wavered. The characters in the film are at cross points in realizing these hard truths and you may personally relate to these emotions or know someone close to you who is going through that.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
The film explores the desires for control, identity and family. In combination, they serve to also challenge the micro and macro aggressions of our society onto those who are cast off as different. And underneath it all, the undercurrent of deep-rooted and misunderstood unconditional love stays present between the broken relationships desperate for reconnection.
This project comments on the complexity of living in America as a person of color, immigrant, female and a first-generation American. Armed with two perspectives, we portray two sides of the same coin, an immigrant mother who had abandoned her child and the first generation children who have been abandoned from two different cultures coexisting and brushing each other’s lives during one incident. We also do this with the two men in the film who act on violence and to seek control.
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development?
The script went through a lot of development the months before we went into production. One of the biggest risks the team heavily discussed was having more than one narrative within a short film. We did our due diligence and looked at what the film would look like if we went with a single storyline and then ended up settling on having two storylines in the short so that the heart of the film stays intact. In the feature version, we get to explore all four characters.
One of our senior lecturers at the AFI Conservatory who teaches World Cinema encourages us to explore storytelling outside the traditional structure and he showed us many eyeopening and impactful nontraditional short films. It really resonated with me to understand that short film is a medium where storytellers can truly experiment and I love that!
What type of feedback have you received so far?
It’s been a very moving process with receiving feedback from friends and colleagues to strangers and film critics. I’ve had people come up in tears with how much it resonated with them on many levels and others letting me know how much it sparked long conversation and debates between committees and groups.
One of the main things I wanted the audience to be asking is whether they felt the actions the character took is “right or wrong” and whether or not they’d be able to understand if judgement came to play after or before reflecting on a bigger picture of what is happening.
Has the feedback surprised or challenged your point of view?
Two words that have been a surprise for me to hear repeated over and over is this phrase: “Thank you.”
It shook me and it was incredibly heartwarming to understand where those two words stem from. They felt seen or that someone close to them is a bit more represented on screen. And as a filmmaker, that means the world to me that I and other filmmakers have the ability to validate our human existence in this very diverse world we live in through the films we make and stories we tell.
What are you looking to achieve by having your film more visible on www.wearemovingstories.com?
We’re expanding the short into a feature and we’re looking to connect with other creatives and industry folks as we move forward.
Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
We just started our festival run towards the end of this summer so we’d love to meet anyone who is interested in sharing, screening, and opening the film to a wider audience!
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
Empathy, awareness, conversation, bridging worldview, and action.
We’ve had the honor in speaking on panels about immigration, talks about championing identity, and lectures on craft at universities with this film. We’re connecting to many communities that we’d love to collaborate with and meeting and we hope to continue doing so!
What’s a key question that will help spark a debate or begin a conversation about this film?
What would you have done if you were caught in that situation? Is it right or wrong? Why?
Would you like to add anything else?
I would love to thank some of my incredible cast and team. The actors in this film gave so much to these characters and I loved working with them: Dianne Doan, Brandon Soo Hoo, Raquenel, and Nick Fink! My writing team are such talented wizards with words and together we wrote beautiful and poignant pages - thank you, Yumiko Fujiwara and Sebastian Sarinana! And my longtime collaborator - Hanan Townshend nailed it with the score of the film. I’m lucky to work with these very soulful and gifted creatives.
What other projects are the key creatives developing or working on now?
Besides expanding this film into a feature, I have another feature called Triad of Us under a development grant with the Russo Brother’s AGBO & AFI. I’m also writing a dramatic comedy short-form series with my writing partner, Brittany Washington in New York.
Interview:September 2019
We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series, music video, women's films, LGBTQIA+, POC, First Nations, scifi, supernatural, horror, world cinema. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
Our Home Here
Parallel stories of broken relationships between parents and their children striving for the American Dream all revolving around one explosive night at a fast-food joint.
Length: 16:53
Director: Angela Chen
Producer: Summer Yang
Writer: Angela Chen and Yumiko Fujiwara
About the writer, director and producer:
ANGELA CHEN is a director born and raised in the heart of Texas with family roots in Taiwan and China. Her films have won numerous awards and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, Austin Film Festival, and more. Angela’s current narrative feature is the recipient of the Russo Brothers’ AGBO Films and AFI’s Development Grant. She was an Armed with a Camera Fellow at Visual Communications and a recipient of the ITVS Diversity Development Fund. Angela is a graduate from the Directing program at the prestigious American Film Institute Conservatory and studied Film at the University of Texas at Austin.
Born in Tokyo, YUMIKO FUJIWARA moved to Johannesburg at the young age of two, to Mexico City at nine, to Rome at 15, to New York at 18. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where she received a Bachelor of Liberal Arts with concentrations in Screenwriting and Visual Arts. Much of her work revolves around tranquil and still qualities that are often unseen, drowned out in bustling urban environments. Yumiko holds an MFA in screenwriting at the AFI Conservatory. Professionally, she has written for a variety of formats in the film medium, including music videos, art videos, short films, pilots and promotional web films.
As UCLA alumnus, who recently completed her master degree in producing at AFI Conservatory, SUMMER YANG served as a consultant for the Amazon Studios series Bosch as well as feature development at Blumhouse Productions. Summer has produced American Advertising Award-winning commercials, TV series, independent features and numerous shorts. Currently, she’s funding a non-profit dedicated to empowering young minority filmmakers.
Key cast: Dianne Doan (Rose, Brandon Soo Hoo (Dylan), Raquenel (Celine), Nick Fink (Sean)
Looking for: journalists, producers, distributors, film festival directors
Facebook: Our Home Here
Instagram: @ourhomehere_film
Website: ourhomeherefilm.com
Where can I watch it next and in the coming month? Urbanworld Film Festival/New York - September; Catalina Film Festival/Catalina Islands - September, Victory International Film Festival/Indiana - September