After the death of her father, Zhenzhen is smuggled to the Caribbean island where her brother, Wei, works in construction. Wei gets her a job at a restaurant, but when the smuggler demands more cash, Zhenzhen is forced into a compromising position. Help comes unexpectedly from Evelyn, who runs an art gallery in the neighborhood—but the contrast between the dark rooms above the restaurant and the blindingly white gallery calls everyone’s innocence into question.
Emilie Upczak is an independent filmmaker, academic, an Andy Warhol grant recipient and a Rotterdam Producers Lab alumni. She has her MFA in Film from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work focuses on climate justice, migration, and economic, racial and gender hierarchies. Her films reflect her interest in hybridity, blending fiction and non-fiction techniques, and highlighting actors and non-actors. She makes narrative, experimental, and non-fiction films and works with archival footage and collections. Her films range from feature length narratives to public video projections to digital exhibitions.
Emilie spent ten years living in Trinidad and Tobago, where she began making films and worked as the Creative Director for the trinidad+tobago film festival spearheading the Caribbean Film Database and the Caribbean Film Mart. Her debut narrative feature “Moving Parts”, a human smuggling and sex trafficking film, set in the capital city of Port of Spain, premiered at the Denver Film Festival and is available through the films distributor, Indiepix.
In 2022, she wrote and directed a narrative short film entitled “Silt”, a story of loss centered on the Colorado river, which premiered at the Independent Film Festival Boston where it won the special jury award and went on to receive a Federal Emergency Management Agency Climate Resilience Storytelling Award. “Silt” also screened at the Smithsonian Institute Mother Tongue Film Festival.
