The Vilcek Foundation is grateful for a continued partnership with the Hawai’i International Film Festival to present the New American Perspectives (NAP) program during their 45^th annual event — HIFF45. 

Made possible with a grant from the Vilcek Foundation, New American Perspectives highlights the voices of immigrant filmmakers, offering them a platform to share their creative visions through film screenings, talks, and programs presented to festival audiences.

The 2025 NAP program is celebrating five outstanding filmmakers. This year’s cohort is unique: all five participants worked as both screenwriter and director on their featured films. Shih-Ching Tsou (Left-Handed Girl), Lloyd Lee Choi (Lucky Lu), Leon Le (Ky Nam Inn), Nani Sahra Walker (Shakti), and Amy Wang (Slanted) will present their respective films to audiences at HIFF45. 

Each New American Perspectives filmmaker will participate in a Q&A following a screening of their film. This program also includes a panel discussion with filmmakers Leon Le, Lloyd Lee Choi, Nani Sahra Walker, and Amy Wang titled “New American Perspectives in Filmmaking,” moderated by film scholar Duncan Caillard.

Taiwanese immigrant Shih-Ching Tsou will present a masterclass on Wednesday, October 22, following the Hawai’i premiere of her film Left-Handed Girl. Tsou and the film garnered global acclaim after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025. In September 2025, Taiwan announced that Left-Handed Girl was its official entry to the 98^th annual Academy Awards for Best International Feature.

Through the New American Perspectives program, the Vilcek Foundation and HIFF provide vital support to the next generation of immigrant filmmakers, centering their voices, stories, and artistry. 

Shih-Ching Tsou

Born in Taiwan
Director and screenwriter, Left-Handed Girl

Filmmaker Shih-Ching Tsou grew up in Taipei, Taiwan, where she earned her bachelor’s degree at Fu Jen Catholic University. She moved to the United States in 1998 to pursue her master’s degree in filmmaking at The New School in New York. Tsou stunned audiences with her debut feature, Take Out, when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. The film also marked Tsou’s first collaboration with Sean Baker, with whom she would go on to produce critically acclaimed films including Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket. 

Across her career, Tsou has served as a screenwriter, actor, director, producer, costume designer, production designer, and editor. A master of her craft, her talents are fully on display in Left-Handed Girl, where she explores the hopes, expectations, and challenges experienced by a mother and daughter in the setting of a night market in Taiwan. The film is innately personal to Tsou: her own grandfather told her when she was a child that the left hand is “the devil’s hand”. Tsou says she thinks “every character—the mother, the daughter, the sisters—is a fragment of myself.”  

Lloyd Lee Choi

Born in Canada to Korean parents
Director and screenwriter, Lucky Lu

Born in Toronto, Canada, to Korean parents, Lloyd Lee Choi initially wanted to pursue a career in aerospace engineering. Growing up in Ottawa, he was admitted to Toronto’s Ryerson University for engineering at the age of 17; a change of heart compelled Lee Choi to instead move across the continent to enroll in a liberal arts program in Vancouver, where he fell in love with film, helping friends and classmates with their projects. Working a variety of roles—from boom operator to production manager—gave him skills he transferred into commercial film after he graduated.

The COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point as Lee Choi shifted his focus to creative projects, namely writing and directing two narrative shorts: Closing Dynasty and Same Old. The latter premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, where it garnered critical acclaim before going on to win honors at the Toronto International Film Festival and at the HBO Max APA Visionaries Awards. Based on Same Old, Lee Choi’s narrative feature Lucky Lu tells the story of a Chinese immigrant and delivery worker in a race to retrieve his stolen e-bike and to secure an apartment for his wife and daughter, who are arriving to join him in New York after a five-year separation. 

Leon Le

Born in Vietnam
Director and screenwriter, Ky Nam Inn

Postwar Saigon of the 1980s is both the setting of Leon Le’s narrative feature Ky Nam Inn and the city he called home until the age of 13, when his family immigrated to the United States. Le’s love of the arts emerged at a young age, first as a fascination with Vietnam’s cải lương opera traditions and then with American musical theater. He pursued a career as a dancer and performer on Broadway and in national touring companies for over a decade. In 2012, he shifted his artistic focus to filmmaking as he sought more creative control in the work he produced. Le’s first short film, Dawn, which premiered in 2012, earned him honors at the Rhode Island Film Festival and the Asians on Film Festival. He went on to repeat these successes with his second short, Talking to My Mother, and his first feature-length film, Song Lang. 

In Ky Nam Inn, Le paints a portrait of individuals navigating the flux of political, economic, and social upheaval following the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1976. The film captures the tenuous relationships of residents in an apartment complex in Saigon, through a budding relationship between a new resident—a young translator—and an older widow. The conflict that emerges from their connection reveals how the trauma of the war has shaped the present and persistent hurts felt by each resident in the close-knit community. 

Nani Sahra Walker

Born in Nepal
Director and screenwriter, Shakti

Filmmaker Nani Sahra Walker is a director, writer, and producer whose works span documentary, narrative, and commercial film. Sahra Walker began her career in film as an editor with FlickerLab and Viacom, working on documentary projects such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. In 2008, she founded Dancing Star Films, where she oversaw a variety of narrative, documentary, and commercial projects, including Caltrain Express and Other Nature. She has led projects for Netflix, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and in 2023, she executive produced the Academy Award–winning short film The Last Repair Shop. 

In Shakti, Sahra Walker tells the story of a free-spirited girl named Maya and her mother and aunt as the three navigate the dynamics of tradition, societal expectations, and gender roles in Kathmandu. When Maya falls sick with a mysterious illness, the three women are forced to confront generational wounds and the dynamics of class and economics that imperil women in Nepal. 

Amy Wang

Born in China
Director and screenwriter, Slanted

Screenwriter and filmmaker Amy Wang was born in China and moved with her family to Australia at the age of 7. From a young age, she witnessed how immigration shaped people’s paths, and was compelled to compose stories that captured these experiences. She first pursued this with studies in media arts and production while earning her bachelor’s degree at the University of Technology Sydney. In 2015, Wang moved to the United States to attend the American Film Institute (AFI), where she earned her MFA in Directing in 2017. While attending AFI she developed, wrote, and directed the award-winning narrative short, Unnatural. Moving to Australia and the United States as an “outsider” has given Wang a keen eye for exploring themes of isolation, the absurdity of popular culture, and societal expectations. These themes are writ large in her first narrative feature, Slanted, a satirical teen drama punctuated with elements of body horror and dark humor.