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 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 blends cinematic intimacy with journalistic rigor through a deeply human lens. A former BBC producer and now an independent filmmaker, Xinyan has directed and produced work for major broadcasters including PBS, BBC, Channel News Asia and NHK. Her feature debut, Made in Ethiopia, won a Special Jury Mention at the 2024 Tribeca Festival and went on to tour more than 50 international festivals with support from the Ford Foundation, IDA, and the Danish Film Institute. She also directed Maui’s Deadly Firestorm for PBS Frontline, winner of an Emmy and the Scripps Howard Journalism Award for excellence in climate and community reporting. Her latest documentary short Cindy Tran: From Here to Here for PBS American Masters premiered at DOCNYC in November 2025. Xinyan is a New America National Fellow, a Firelight Media Doc Lab fellow, a Brown Girls Doc Mafia Sustainable Artist fellow and a Yaddo Residency alum.
