Poet Cindy Tran creates works that bridge personal memories and shared experiences, reflecting on childhood, parental expectations, and societal stigmas around an Asian-American identity.
CINDY TRAN: FROM HERE TO HERE weaves together family history, estrangement, and the quiet resilience of everyday life through the lens of Cindy Tran's poems. A poet who first found her voice writing poems as Yelp reviews, Cindy transforms small, ordinary details into portals to hidden emotions. Blending vérité storytelling with dreamlike imagery, the film invites audiences into Cindy’s world, where grief and resilience, silence and expression, estrangement and belonging coexist. At its heart, the film is a meditation on how poetry can hold the complexities of immigrant family histories and offer rare spaces of reflection and healing within Asian American communities.
Xinyan Yu is an Emmy-winning journalist and filmmaker with nearly 15 years of experience crafting intimate, character-driven films across continents. From factory floors in rural Ethiopia to wildfire zones in Hawaii, she specializes in vérité and investigative storytelling that combines cinematic intimacy with journalistic rigor through a deeply human lens. A former BBC producer turned independent filmmaker, Xinyan has directed, produced, and shot documentaries for PBS Frontline, NOVA, American Masters, BBC News, and NHK. She is a New America National Fellow, a Firelight Media Doc Lab Fellow, and a Yaddo alum.
