The Vilcek Foundation and the Hawai’i International Film Festival began working together in 2007, when the foundation provided a grant to launch a pilot program—then known as American Immigrant Filmmakers on Profile—to serve as a platform to elevate immigrant filmmakers and their voices at the annual film festival. 

The program has since been rebranded as New American Perspectives—honoring the unique insights and views immigrant artists bring to film and cinema, both in front of and behind the camera. New American Perspectives amplifies immigrant artists’ voices and work through film screenings, master classes, filmmaker Q&As, panel discussions, and programs with local schools at the festival. 

The 2023 New American Perspectives cohort was comprised of seven immigrant and first-generation artists and filmmakers, whose experiences, voices, and artwork were spotlit through the program.

Geoff McFetridge

Born in Canada, of Chinese and Canadian descent
Subject, Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life

Visual artist Geoff McFetridge is known for his bold illustrative artwork and graphics, and his partnerships with filmmakers Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola. The subject of director Dan Covert’s Geoff McFetridge: Drawing a Life, McFetridge describes feeling of being divided between his Chinese and Canadian heritage as a youth, before finding community in skateboarding culture. McFetridge muses on discovering his voice, and coming into his own as an artist, entrepreneur, and athlete. His artwork is now ubiquitous, as his bold graphic style has been embraced by major companies including Apple, Warby Parker, and Hermes. 

Sing J. Lee

Born in the United Kingdom, of Hong Kong descent
Director, The Accidental Getaway Driver

Sing J. Lee grew up in the working-class city of Wrexham, in Wales, the son of immigrant parents from Hong Kong. The search for belonging and the experiences of people at the fringes of society are a core theme in Lee’s work. His feature directorial debut, The Accidental Getaway Driver, tells the true story of a Vietnamese cab driver in Southern California, drawn unwittingly into being an accomplice and a hostage in a jailbreak and the ensuing manhunt, first reported in a GQ feature of the same name. The film premiered at the Sundance International Film Festival in 2023, earning Lee the Director’s Award and a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize. 

A filmmaker and musician, Lee got his start in filmmaking with shorts Flux and First the Bird Fell, and directing music videos for artists like Charli XCX, Halsey, Alicia Keys, and Muse.

Sara Nodjoumi

Born in the United States to Iranian parents
Director, A Revolution on Canvas

Filmmaker Sara Nodjoumi grew up keenly aware of the profound power of art as a tool to confront authoritarianism. She recalls watching footage of the Iranian revolution on TV as a child, hoping to catch a glimpse of her father, painter Nickzad Nodjoumi, who had traveled to Iran to engage in artmaking and protest. 

As a producer, her films, including When God Sleeps and The Iran Job, highlight the power of cultural exchange, art, and dissent to shape political movements. Nodjoumi’s directorial debut, A Revolution on Canvas, takes on her most personal subject to date: her father and the artwork that compelled his exile from Iran. 

Nodjoumi co-produced and co-directed her first short, I Call Myself Persian: Iranians In America in 2002; the film premiered at MoMA Documentary Fortnight and was shown on PBS. From 2004 to 2009 Nodjoumi worked as an associate programmer with the Tribeca Film Festival. She is an alum of the Sundance Creative Producers Summit and the IFP Cannes Producers Network Fellowship. In 2008, she founded Partner Pictures with Till Schauder.

Nickzad Nodjoumi

Born in Iran
Subject, A Revolution on Canvas

Iranian-born painter Nickzad Nodjoumi is known for his bold paintings, illustrations, and prints, which address Iranian and American politics, history, power, and corruption. Nodjoumi was born in Kermanshah, Iran; he studied fine art at Tehran University before traveling to New York, where he earned his Master’s in Fine Arts degree from the City College of New York in 1974.

In the late 1970s, Nodjoumi returned to Iran to support the Iranian Revolution. Disillusioned with the theocracy of the subsequent Islamic Republic of Iran, Nodjoumi stayed, participating in continued protest. In 1980, the Nodjoumi was engaged by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art to present an exhibition, A Report on the Revolution, featuring more than 100 works. The night prior to the show’s opening, Nodjoumi was warned to leave the country. Within hours, he was on a plane, and the museum removed the paintings and closed the exhibition out of fear of protests.

Nodjoumi continued his career in the United States, while navigating the fallout of his political and artistic ideals on his own life and the lives of his wife and children. As the subject of A Revolution on Canvas, Nodjoumi’s driven idealism is spotlit as both the source of his artistic genius and his greatest flaw. 

Till Schauder

Born in the United States to German parents
Director, A Revolution on Canvas 

Born in Seattle to German parents, Till Schauder moved to Germany at age 2. At the age of 19, he returned to the United States to pursue an internship in filmmaking with Roger Corman. He moved back to Germany in 1992, to pursue his MA at the University of Television and Film, Munich. While still a student, Schauder wrote and directed his first feature film, Strong Shit, a narrative about four disillusioned youth after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The film won the Max Ophuels Film Festival Jury Award in 1997. 

Schauder has worked alongside Nodjoumi as a director and cinematographer for award-winning films including When God Sleeps, The Iran Job, and Reggae Boyz. As a co-director and cinematographer for A Revolution on Canvas, Schauder balances the film’s intensity with artful framing and a keen and empathetic observational lens.

Chiaki Yanagimoto

Born in Japan
Director, Aum: The Cult at the End of the World

Chiaki Yanagimoto is a producer, director, and the founder of SAKKA Films, a distribution platform for independent Japanese film. SAKKA serves both filmmakers and audiences: providing meaningful support for artists by promoting their work, and giving film-lovers across the globe an affordable and accessible way to see independent Japanese cinema. 

Yanagimoto honed her skills in filmmaking and storytelling as a producer on narrative genre films before transitioning to documentary work with the award-winning films Kampai! For the Love of Sake, and Words Can’t Go There. Aum: The Cult at the End of the World marks Yanagimoto’s directorial debut, with co-director Ben Braun. The subject of the film was of personal interest to Yanagimoto, who grew up in Yamanashi Prefecture, where the Aum Shinrikyo cult made its headquarters in the early 1990s. 

Denise Zmekhol

Born in Brazil
Director, Skin of Glass

In the introduction to Skin of Glass, filmmaker Denise Zmekhol muses on the artistic legacy of her late father, the architect Roger Zmekhol, who gave Denise her first camera when she was just a child. The film explores Zmekhol’s relationship to her father and to São Paulo and Brazil at large through his modernist masterpiece, the Wilton Paes de Almeida Building in São Paulo, more commonly known as the Pele de Vidro/Skin of Glass. 

Denise Zmekhol first moved to the United States to pursue higher education, studying photography and journalism in Southern California. In the late 1980s, she photographed children of the Indigenous Surui and Negarote tribes in the Amazon as part of a project with Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper who sought to preserve the environment of the Amazon and the people who lived there. Her debut feature film, Children of the Amazon, revisits these sites, seeing the children of the tribes 15 years later, as young adults who have grown up amidst a rapidly changing environment and deforestation. Denise is the founder of ZD Films, a production and multimedia company based in Berkeley, California, and Jabuticaba Productions, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. In addition to her own independent films, Zmekhol has served as a director, producer, and cinematographer on projects for clients including Google and PBS.