2024 Update

Hello everyone,

I'm starting a film festival, Transfiguration International Film Festival, based off of the program I did last year. The website is here. The program for this year is figured out, most of my filmmakers have approved my requests, and I'm currently looking for venues to host it in Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and maybe some other places too. I spend so much time programming for other festivals and finding new work, and I've actually been a bit angsty for a long time that I've had to play by other peoples' rules in those spaces. So I've decided to bite the bullet and just start doing my own one. I've had a few of you comment on enjoying my sense of curation, so hopefully this is exciting. I have a lot of cool plans for it. 

I'm still working on Take Off the Blindfold, but as you know if you've been keeping up with the updates, I've been reorganizing as a result of changing the format to a feature rather than episodic. It's a bit of a hectic process, but I'm trying to spend time making sure it's exactly what I want/need it to be. Something I've run into trouble with is that it's beginning to reflect events that are ongoing in my personal life, and as such there's an element of waiting to see how those events unfold. The circumstances I have been undergoing since August have changed my life fundamentally and there's not really any going back now, and my work has in a sense caught up with my life. It's a really bizarre time for me to be trying to make my work, because it feels as if It's all looped in on itself and become this strange beast that is impossible for me to explain at this stage. So please bear with me as it's going to take a lot longer than I expected to get through this project. I'm working on it every day still, it's just becoming more complicated and interwoven with real life. 

As you may have seen, I've started doing documentary work in school. My goal with my documentaries is to try and showcase people and topics that are important to me, and follow the threads that are unfolding in my real life, that I'm alluding to above, with regards to where I come from and how I got here. I'm really excited about this documentary work and I hope you're enjoying it so far. I'm most likely getting a travel grant from my school to go to Korea to shoot one of the documentaries. 

Right now in school I'm focusing primarily on classes about Asian politics, art and history. I've organized situations with my professors where I can focus primarily on making my film work for these classes despite them being in other departments. The classes are: "Mass Demonstration: Art Politics and Collective Action in Asia", "Contemporary Chinese Art Since the 1970s",  both with Jennifer Dorothy Lee, "Colonialism, Orientalism and Primitivism in India and Southeast Asia", and "The Long Poem". I'm pretty excited for this semester.

Anyway, more to come. Thanks for sticking with me through this challenging time