Taiwan’s Yang Chieh is the winner of the Best Asian American Student Filmmaker East Region in this year’s Directors Guild of America’s DGA Student Film Awards, the Los Angeles-headquartered organization announced Dec. 4.
The honors, which recognize outstanding work from minority and women students studying cinema in the U.S., chose Yang for her short “Tail End of the Year.” Set during the late 1980s in a traditional Taiwan village, the movie follows a young girl as she waits for her single mother to return home for Lunar New Year.
Partially based on her experiences, the film attempts to capture the feelings of family love along with the magical atmosphere of New Year’s Eve when the old year dies and the new one is born, the 29-year-old said. The movie won a student grant earlier this year from the New York-based film industry organization National Board of Review.
“Highlighting emerging talent is a vital part of the DGA’s ongoing commitment to inclusion, and we’re proud that a number of our past winners found success in film and television,” DGA President Thomas Schlamme said in a statement. The awards ceremony is set to take place Dec. 7 in New York, where each winner will also receive US$2,500 in prize money.
This is not Yang’s first honor. In 2016, at the Tribeca Film Festival in the U.S., the 15-minute short “Ping Pong Coach,” which she wrote and produced, won a Student Visionary Award. (KWS-E)
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