Afterimages Across Borders: Award-Winning Shorts

Director: Multiple Dirs

2025 / 71min / DCP

A one-night-only screening featuring works, currently in award season consideration, by four Asian diaspora filmmakers with roots in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iran, and Vietnam—their films moving between the personal and political to address themes of kinship, memory, survival, and the traces left, from generation to generation, of the experience of war and migration. Featuring We Were the Scenery, recounting the experience of writer Cathy Linh Che’s Vietnam War refugee parents, recruited as extras for Apocalypse Now during its filming in the Philippines; Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites, in which the title character sneaks away from the afterlife on hearing that her queer grandson is engaged to a woman; One Day this Kid, describing a young, gay Afghan Canadian boy’s coming of age in Vancouver under the scrutiny of his immigrant father; and Who Loves the Sun, a documentary depicting a lone oil worker amid the makeshift oil refineries of war-torn northern Syria. The program will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.

“Following the quotidian lives of a lone oil worker amid the burning makeshift refineries of Syria, a queer Afghan in diaspora as he comes of age, a Vietnamese refugee family cast as background extras in a major U.S. war film, and a Cambodian grandmother’s ghost at her family’s Qingming visit; these Oscar-qualified fiction and non-fiction short films meditate on land, memory, and the enduring kinships that support communities as they heal from the echoes of both wartime and personal struggles.“ –Jess X. Snow, producer/cinematographer of We Were the Scenery

Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites (Chheangkea, 2025, 19 mins)

We Were the Scenery (Christopher Radcliff, 2025, 15 mins)

One Day This Kid (Alexander Farah, 2024, 18 mins)

Who Loves the Sun (Arshia Shakiba, 2024, 19 mins)