“A Short Tale of Xuan” is the first part of a trilogy. The trilogy consists of three short unconventional fairy-tales with stories that revolve around mushrooms. The film consists of both live action and animation. There are clear experimental aspects employed in both the live action cinematography and the mixed medium fabric animation sequences. This film is my first attempt at animation, which I love, and I plan to implement mixed mediums with the other films as well.

The winter prior to writing the script, my little sister, Scenery, took a mycology class and had begun to go mushroom hunting. I too had started to become really interested in mushroom hunting and the culture that surrounded it. I began to research and find out about families who made a living as mushroom hunters and also peoples love for spending days and days searching the grounds of cold damp forests for mushrooms. There were two stories that really affected me, one was about a family that lived in a camper with their children and their dog. They went from camp to camp making a living as mushroom hunters. Another story was about a Japanese family who had gone out together to hunt, came home, cooked their poisonous mushrooms and then after eating them, all died together. These haunted me and I started to create fairy-tales from these real stories.

What I also found compelling about these families was that most of them were poor and immigrants. I started to imagine what it would be like as a child to explore those forests with my family. It is complex and hard for any child to go through a coming of age. In this film I show a piece of what it is like as a child living between many worlds culturally, in poverty and within your self and your imagination while trying to find a place that is your own.

I chose to work within the Vietnamese community because of a strong connection to that community from my childhood. I related very closely to those childhood friends and their families. We were all children of poor immigrant parents and had very similar experiences. I wanted to maintain a strong integrity with the representation of the culture. It was very important that my cast was Vietnamese, which was a challenge in terms of finding the right actors. At one point, after having gone thru all of the avenues I could think of, I began to post casting calls in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco which has a very large Vietnamese community.

Once I found my actors, this cultural integrity was largely maintained by them. They were many times my consultants regarding language and cultural nuances. My two adult actors, Hang Nguyen and Kim Mai, had to match their accents, as they come from two parts of Vietnam where they speak different dialects. The actors, along with their families, were a great help in teaching me how to dress the set, especially in the kitchen, telling me exactly what a Vietnamese family living in San Francisco might have in their apartment. They also worked with me during the improvisational acting where I asked them to speak naturally as a family, flowing back and forth in between Vietnamese and English.

For the part of Xuan, I only had two auditions. Kerina Yao was strongly recommended to me by another SF State graduate student, Van Nguyen, who had cast Kerina in her film “Circle” two years earlier. When Kerina showed up at the audition, after taking the bus across town with her mother and a friend, I knew immediately that she was Xuan. In silence, she had exactly the curious and thoughtful look that I imagined Xuan to have. Since Xuan doesn’t speak for most of the film, Kerina’s facial expressions were key in the casting of this role. This is Kerina Yao’s first lead role, but she has played supporting roles in many other short films and has been modeling for a few years

The close ups and details of what Xuan sees and feels capture her discovery of the world around her, her relationships to herself, her emerging sexuality and her growing curiosity. There are also other important relationships which reveal her emerging loss of innocence and childhood into a new realm, these are her relationships to her sister, her mother and her grandmother and a love interest.

I found my other actors, Kim Mai, Hang Nguyen, and Koe Inlow after a long search. Kim Mai was urged to audition for the part by her son, who is an actor himself. This is her first role, and her subtleties and naturalism as an actor are amazing. Hang Nguyen is a trained actress and I was very lucky to work with her on this film. Kim and Hang were great in collaborating with the improvisation in Vietnamese. This is Koe Inlow’s first film, she is a family friend of Kerina’s and I knew she was perfect right away. She was a lot of fun on the set and a natural on screen. Koe and Kerina also became really involved behind the scene, doing things like the slate and calling for quiet on the set. I am always hearing that it is difficult to work with children but all the films I’ve made involve kids. I love working with them and I think they are natural actors and easier to direct. They always make the set a lot more fun for everyone.

The Director of Photography is my partner in crime, DW Lech. DW is a filmmaker and photographer, and he was a very instrumental part in the making of this film. I chose him as my cinematographer because of his past work, which was extremely beautiful, innovative and unique. I also knew that we could work closely together and he would give me the space and flexibility I needed to work in a narrative but also experimental style. We wanted to have three very distinct and separate looks in this film, a natural look for most of the film, a magical look for the storytelling sequence, and a distinct look for the animation sequences. When Xuan tells the story to her sister Thuy in the forest, we used alternative processing with the film, both cross processing and pushing. In addition, we also played with filtration, smudging vaseline onto a clear filter, which refracts the light. The influence for this is the complex darkness of traditional fairy-tales, while at the same time keeping a childhood innocence with hhe softness and glow of light.

For the animation sequences I wanted to create a world that was uniquely my own style and that is why I chose to hand sew, paint and use found objects in nature to create the fairy-tale world. I created the sets at home with my ten year old son, Ceili, who also helped film the sequences. We used recycled fabric and found objects to create the puppets and animated world. We collected objects from the woods behind our house and DW made felt animals with me and helped sew the set. My friend and fellow filmmaker Kapi’Olani Lee drew the puppets of the girl. Scott Nordlund, another friend and filmmaker, helped with the stop motion animation. Scott’s stop motion resume is very impressive, ranging from the Pizza Hut “Noid” commercials, California Raisins commercials, and directing the Weird Al Yankovic stop-mo video “Jurassic Park”. The last animation sequence is a stop motion piece which reflects the transformation of Xuan, her inner world of stories and the world around her.

Sound design was essential for this film in many ways, in particular in revealing the world around the young girl and helping us as an audience understand her inner world. The original music was composed by Jason Pace a local musician from the groups Bottled Og and Lord God Bird. His innovative compositions gave me the sound I was looking for, creating a landscape of childlike sounds and experimental music with a woven thread of Vietnamese/Chinese influences.

Prior to shooting the script, I was awarded the Fotokem Grant from the Cinema Department, which was an incredible support financially for the film. In September of 2006, I struck my final answer print of the film, using this grant. “A Short Tale of Xuan” was shot in the winter of 2006. The locations were all over San Francisco and Tilden Park in Berkeley. Tilden Park was perfect in the late winter, especially with all of the rain, because there were mushrooms everywhere.

This film has led me to the next part of the trilogy, another coming of age tale of a young boy. I hope to cast my son Ceili as the lead, he is the perfect actor for the role and also the main influence of the story. This film is primarily animation and involves communication between animal species, the forest and our relationship to the natural world. The third film involves a gypsy family who lives in their trailer, moving from forest to forest searching for mushrooms. This is a love story between two young girls. It is also the tale of a family transcending strip malls and consumerism to create their own world.