When the youngest in a family is hospitalized after a suicide attempt, three generations of a Chinese American immigrant family grapple with their grief in disparate ways. 

Director Biography - Justine Ellen Chen

Justine Ellen Chen is a genderqueer, Chinese-American filmmaker and member of the Art Director’s Guild. Chen is primarily interested in the way that environments can act as temporal archives, holding memory, texture, and emotion. Their practice is greatly informed by this, as well as their commitment to showcasing the real details and complexities of underrepresented identities on the screen.

Having begun their career through production designing films by prestigious programs such as Disney, Film Independent, and Hillman Grad, Chen is developing a deft hand for storytelling. Most recently, their work has been screened at festivals such as Tribeca Film Festival, Palm Springs ShortFest, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, Outfest, and Frameline. Chen’s design work in The Roof and Maxine can be found in the Disney Launchpad Season 2 collection, streaming on Disney+. Inheritors is Chen’s directorial debut, and made possible through a WAVE Grant award.

Director Statement

Going through someone’s private apartment in their absence can be an intimate, intrusive experience for both parties. For the women of Inheritors, this intrusion picks at their grief, evokes memory and confusion, and puts their family dynamics on display.

With Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders being one of the lowest racial and ethnic groups likely to seek mental illness treatment, and suicide being the leading cause of death for Asian American and Pacific Islanders between the ages of 18-24, I cannot help but think about how mental health issues don’t appear out of a vaccuum. In China and Chinese immigrant communities around the world, disclosure of mental illness is uncommon due to its stereotypes and stigma. I think about my grandparents, their parents before them, and my mom when she was my age—how mental illness was never a concrete concept in their lives, though they have felt and continue to feel the effects of the generations before them. Inheritors is an Asian American story that exhibits the particular type of intimacy that takes place when family dynamics affected by mental illness are left unresolved.

Though we don’t meet the youngest daughter in Inheritors, the evidence of her mental crisis permeates the entire space as her family picks up trash off the ground, sifts through rotting laundry, or pries open over-stuffed drawers. Each family member, represented in three generations speaking three different languages (English, Mandarin, and Shanghainese), responds in the face of crisis. There is dissonance between their ways of caring and enduring. The resulting intimacy is all encompassing and brutal, as they continue forward, living onwards and together.