Miida Chu is a Los Angeles-based writer-director on an upward trajectory. She was a semi-finalist at the Outfest Screenwriting Lab, a Quarterfinalist at the ScreenCraft Feature Competition, and one of the seven cinematic arts finalists of the 2014 National Young Arts Competition. Her short film Eureka won the prestigious Golden Reel Award at the 38th Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, which qualifies the film for award consideration for the Academy Award. We had the opportunity to discuss the film and her current project.
Thank you for agreeing to catch up with Occhi Magazine. Congratulations on your career to date. how did you get into the industry? ( Note: please share your entry into the sector, your study, mentors etc)
My grad school American Film Institute was instrumental in orienting my writer-director career. The film Eureka was my MFA thesis film. My mentor Barry Sabath helped me see my value as a storyteller. He encouraged me to take risks in telling stories I previously was too afraid to tell. The hardest thing for me to overcome was (and still is) to suspend my self judgement and write unapologetically from the unconscious.
Before AFI my journey as a filmmaker was a lot of wandering. I started making films in fifth grade because I thought it would be a great excuse to get friends together over the summer break. I continued to make films in middle school because I thought it was an effective way win the attention of the girl I had a crush on. I ended up going to high school at the Interlochen Arts Academy, an arts boarding in the middle of nowhere in Northern Michigan. I made a lot of good friends there and made a lot of experimental narrative films. I eventually got sick and tired of what I was doing and studied philosophy for undergrad at New York University. I did a lot of theorizing, hoping to bring the anti-tonal revolution Schoenberg did to classical music to narrative filmmaking. It was a long journey to eventually trust my intuition and tell stories from my heart, rather from my brain.
Who are your biggest industry influences, and why?
For a while it was American writer-directors like Charlie Kaufman and Darren Aronofsky, who works in narrative storytelling but always through an original and formally innovative approach. However, it was not them as a filmmaker that influenced me, but rather their individual films. These days it’s my peers from my grad school that inspire me. Ira Storozhenko taught me what it was like to not give up your vision. Lilly Hu taught me what it was like to be in touch with the characters you want to bring to light.
Congratulations on receiving the Golden Reel Award at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, qualifying it for award considerations for the Oscars. For readers who are unfamiliar with the film festival calendar, can you explain the award selection process?
For the short film Oscar categories, namely the live action, animation, and documentary short films, you have to qualify through winning Oscar-qualifying awards at major film festivals. I believe you can find the list of qualifying awards and festivals here: https://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/95aa_anim_short_festivals.pdf
Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival is one of them. The festival gives out a few awards, but the Golden Reel Award is the one that enables the film to be qualified for the Oscars. It’s the award Eureka won, which qualifies it for the Oscars. From my knowledge there are about 150 live action shorts that get qualified. The Academy narrows it down to a shortlist of 15 films in December, and 5 of these will receive the nomination in January.
Please tell us more about “Eureka” and what audiences can expect.
Eureka is a historical drama-thriller short about a young indentured Chinese prostitute who must overcome her toxic dependency on the brothel madam on the eve of the 1885 anti-Chinese riot in Eureka, California. I was traveling in rural America in 2019 and stumbled upon these forgotten history. The conditions of these Chinese women really resonated with me.
Chinese women living in the 1880s American West faced two forms of oppressions, oppressions for their gender as well as their race. As a Chinese woman who barely spoke English, being a prostitute was one of the only ways to survive. As a Chinese immigrant living in the American West, they were seen as cheap labors stealing white people’s jobs. Being in America was often not their choice. Most of them were sold as indentured labor by their parents in China.
Being at the bottom of the social hierarchy with no support from their family, I can’t help myself but to ask, who did they see themselves as? Did they embrace their identity as Chinese? Did they embrace their identity as women? As a trans filmmaker born in China and has lived in the United States for the past twelve years, I ask myself these questions all the time.
Can you tell us more about the production schedule and research on the 1885 anti-Chinese riot in Eureka, California?
Period films are always expensive to make. I confined the story to take place in one location both as a story challenge as well as a mean to save cost. There were very few exterior pictures of the Chinese brothels from that era, and no pictures of the interior. We took inspirations from pictures of Chinese opium dens from that era.
We used a middle eastern hide-out house on a standing set in Santa Clarita. We put up flats and wallpapered everything. My production designer Xi Chen Chou was very talented. She and her team did everything in a time crunch on a shoestring budget.
What other projects are you currently working on?
I’m working toward getting my first feature made! Currently polishing the script of a queer coming-of-age romantic fantasy titled See You In My Dreams. It’s about a high school girl who discovers that the lover in her recurring dreams actually exists in real life, but she’s too afraid to find him because she’s a closeted trans girl living as a boy in the real world. I’m also developing a high concept one-location space ship movie where everyone on the ship loses their memory everyday.
Where can our readers find out more about you and your projects?
My website is: miidachu.com
My insta and twitter handle is @miidachu
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