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Witness stunning animation in a variety of mediums and styles. These stories by and about Asian Americans use the art of animation to convey deep emotional themes. Creativity comes to life here in the form of 2D, 3D, and stop motion short films.
This screening features 10 films. Toggle between film descriptions by scrolling and clicking on the buttons on the top right.
An ancient poem is brilliantly re-imagined through the art of papercutting and stop-motion animation.
Director Biography - Samhita Sunya
Samhita Sunya comes to filmmaking by way of her career as a film historian. She is currently an Associate Professor of Cinema in the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of SIRENS OF MODERNITY: WORLD CINEMA VIA BOMBAY (University of California Press, 2022), which is an account of the widespread, international popularity of Hindi song-dance films during the Cold War-era 1960s. Raised in Houston, Texas by South Asian immigrant parents, she has lived and worked in India, Lebanon, and Turkey. Her scholarship has been praised for its "rare... vulnerability," for its focus on histories of love and cinephilia, and for the transregional and global dimensions of its historical research. Her first short film, CONFERENCE OF THE MOTHS (2024), draws on her familiarity with an array of artistic, literary, and cinematic genealogies of poetry and visual culture across South/West Asia. Her film, like her scholarship, is driven by a conviction that these genealogies and stories have so much to offer contemporary filmmakers, as we seek to render not only the world that we live in, but also the world in which we aspire to live.
Director Statement
CONFERENCE OF THE MOTHS is a film that I co-wrote with my now ex-partner Ali Bandeali, as we worked through the months-long process of a separation that became final. He and I are Pakistani- and Indian-American, respectively. We both grew up in Texas, and we were lucky that our families supported our relationship from the outset: as an Indian-Pakistani romance, many remarked that ours was the stuff of Bollywood movies. So, too, was the fact that when our relationship started to unravel, our mothers’ and aunties’ well-meaning advice was, “Make a baby, it will fix everything!” (Spoiler alert: We did not make a baby.) Instead, we decided to make a film, as a journey—both within the film and outside of it—of learning to love and to let go without fear.
On the practical side of setting out to make a film, Ali and I had to also pick through our skills and limitations. We lacked experience with directing actors, recording live sound, or dealing with the intricacies of lighting and makeup. But, we both knew that we wanted to make something zany and magical and heartfelt, that I could make paper puppets, that I could draw on my academic knowledge of South/West Asian literary, musical, and artistic forms, that Ali could compose music and edit, and that we had access to a University camera, a public library’s sound recording studio, and the brilliant novelist Rabih Alameddine’s gorgeous voice.
Our script emerged from two conversations that fortuitously coalesced: one, over our shared irritation with the individualist, product-driven rhetoric of care in the contemporary world; and another, over the curious absence of the moth and flame--despite being one of the most iconic motifs of Indo-Persian poetry--from a visual repertoire spanning miniature paintings, textiles, carpets, mosaics, and carvings. It thus feels like nothing short of magic to have made a film for the first time as part of working through the end of a relationship, and to have in the process brought the moth and flame, the Wise Hoopoe from the 12th century Persian epic THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS, and Rabih Alameddine’s voice acting debut to the big screen.
Witness stunning animation in a variety of mediums and styles. These stories by and about Asian Americans use the art of animation to convey deep emotional themes. Creativity comes to life here in the form of 2D, 3D, and stop motion short films.
This screening features 10 films. Toggle between film descriptions by scrolling and clicking on the buttons on the top right.
An ancient poem is brilliantly re-imagined through the art of papercutting and stop-motion animation.
Director Biography - Samhita Sunya
Samhita Sunya comes to filmmaking by way of her career as a film historian. She is currently an Associate Professor of Cinema in the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of SIRENS OF MODERNITY: WORLD CINEMA VIA BOMBAY (University of California Press, 2022), which is an account of the widespread, international popularity of Hindi song-dance films during the Cold War-era 1960s. Raised in Houston, Texas by South Asian immigrant parents, she has lived and worked in India, Lebanon, and Turkey. Her scholarship has been praised for its "rare... vulnerability," for its focus on histories of love and cinephilia, and for the transregional and global dimensions of its historical research. Her first short film, CONFERENCE OF THE MOTHS (2024), draws on her familiarity with an array of artistic, literary, and cinematic genealogies of poetry and visual culture across South/West Asia. Her film, like her scholarship, is driven by a conviction that these genealogies and stories have so much to offer contemporary filmmakers, as we seek to render not only the world that we live in, but also the world in which we aspire to live.
Director Statement
CONFERENCE OF THE MOTHS is a film that I co-wrote with my now ex-partner Ali Bandeali, as we worked through the months-long process of a separation that became final. He and I are Pakistani- and Indian-American, respectively. We both grew up in Texas, and we were lucky that our families supported our relationship from the outset: as an Indian-Pakistani romance, many remarked that ours was the stuff of Bollywood movies. So, too, was the fact that when our relationship started to unravel, our mothers’ and aunties’ well-meaning advice was, “Make a baby, it will fix everything!” (Spoiler alert: We did not make a baby.) Instead, we decided to make a film, as a journey—both within the film and outside of it—of learning to love and to let go without fear.
On the practical side of setting out to make a film, Ali and I had to also pick through our skills and limitations. We lacked experience with directing actors, recording live sound, or dealing with the intricacies of lighting and makeup. But, we both knew that we wanted to make something zany and magical and heartfelt, that I could make paper puppets, that I could draw on my academic knowledge of South/West Asian literary, musical, and artistic forms, that Ali could compose music and edit, and that we had access to a University camera, a public library’s sound recording studio, and the brilliant novelist Rabih Alameddine’s gorgeous voice.
Our script emerged from two conversations that fortuitously coalesced: one, over our shared irritation with the individualist, product-driven rhetoric of care in the contemporary world; and another, over the curious absence of the moth and flame--despite being one of the most iconic motifs of Indo-Persian poetry--from a visual repertoire spanning miniature paintings, textiles, carpets, mosaics, and carvings. It thus feels like nothing short of magic to have made a film for the first time as part of working through the end of a relationship, and to have in the process brought the moth and flame, the Wise Hoopoe from the 12th century Persian epic THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS, and Rabih Alameddine’s voice acting debut to the big screen.
