Andrew Thomas Huang, the Chinese American filmmaker who gave us the darkly sexy Kiss of the Rabbit God and the spectacular video for FKA Twigs’ “Cellophane,” has just released a new short film on his YouTube channel.
Entitled Lily Chan and the Doom Girls, it’s a prelude to Huang’s forthcoming feature Tiger Girl, which promises to be “a surreal coming-of-age fantasy set in 1960s Los Angeles that unfolds as Lily Chan discovers a tiger living in the attic of the home she shares with her socially anxious and domineering mother,” according to FACTmagazine.
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The film stars Mimi Lu as Lily, alongside Hojo Shin, Michelle Park and Linda Ngo and comes with a soundtrack by the fantastic Michelle Zauner, aka Japanese Breakfast.
Huang’s short focuses on a pivotal moment for Lily as she’s adopted by the Doom Girls gang. “She’s too scared to leave Chinatown… scared of a lot of things actually,” Lily nervously says at one point, before she’s told, “Well, you don’t have to live your life that way now do you?”
In an earlier post on Instagram, Huang wrote of the short: “I’m excited to share this as a standalone short film that shows that Asian youth lived and thrived at this time in American history even though we were not represented. I grew up seeing photos of my Chinese family in the 60s but have yet to see them on screen. This is dedicated to my mom, my aunties and their Asian sisters. And to my queer fam who offered me escape in high school hanging out in parking lots, talking about our dreams.”
In the meantime, you can watch the complete Kiss of the Rabbit God — which Huang describes as “about a Chinese restaurant worker who falls in love with an 18th century Qing dynasty god” — below:
