Ann Huang
Ann Huang is a multilingual Chinese American poet, filmmaker and visual artist based in Newport Beach, California. Her short-film series Ann Huang Presents is based on her award-winning poetry. Huang's film series echoes metaphysical and multiverse themes such as life and death as well as social ills of the man's world perceived by the female eye. They are marked by broad philosophical and spiritual overtures such as the collective unconscious by Carl Jung. Her films have received numerous accolades in the film festival circuits and showcased in museums. Her work can be found at SaffronSplash.com.
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-Palpitations of Dust is the Finalist: Best Experimental Film at the 2023 IndieFare International Film Festival.
-Indelible Winter has been featured in the UMass Dartmouth University Art Gallery Exhibition called We are All Contagious since May 2020.
-The Pines of Spring will premiere at the PBS (TasteTV) upcoming television series SHORT FILMS ON.
-Sparse won the Best Experimental Project & Best Film Noir at the 2024 8 & Halfilm Awards.
-In the Desert of Eternity won the Best Experimental Film at the 2022 LA International Film Festival.
-Diamond Dust won the Best Experimental Short Film at the 33rd IFS L.A. Film Fest (2023).
Your project has entered in our festival. What is your project about?
Sparse is the fourth film of our experimental film series ANN HUANG PRESENTS, which represents the summer season of a natural year.
Synopsis: The passionate pursuit of an art-filled life by a young woman drives her into a mesmerizing swirl of misdeeds.
Logline: By experiencing waking up from a dream and finding traces to make sense of it, the protagonist asks the audience to think introspectively and retrospectively about their own relationship with the environment they are in.
What are your ambitions with your project?
I strive to make films that bring out the interconnection of our daily living with our unconscious selves, mainly through our dream state. My long-term goal is to gain a wider audience and bring experimental films to everyday cinema and streaming platforms.
Tell us something about your shooting? What pleasantly surprised you?
There was an exterior scene we shot at a train station in San Juan Capistrano, by the Pacific Ocean near the city of San Clemente.
It was a late summer morning but the scene was about derailment and eerie fate, with the twist and thrill of a death threat and/or love suicide. The backdrop mis-a-scene gave the actors quite a happy mood that my DP and I actually wanted to avoid. Right past the mid-day, the sun set so high that the heat was penetrating. The actors just finished their walking scene at the train tracks and started to sweat.
By that time, I asked them to be lying near the tracks. Their faces looked a bit red next to the rocks, which was great in contrast to the overwhelming beauty surrounding them. It was a relief that the human condition could change the scene in such a dramatic turn. I loved the result the summer heat helped us in making the scene so iconic.
For what group of spectators is your film targeted?
Our target spectators are the ones who are film and poetry lovers that have an old ‘soul’ just like me. The ones who are living day-in and day-out measuring humanity within self and at large, who also have a deep appreciation for linguistics, literature, poetry, performing arts, cinematic arts, humanitarian efforts and animal rights in public policy, worldview inclusivity, racial and gender equalities, and solidarity above all.
Why should distributors buy your film?
Joy is the future of our race, and as a filmmaker, we ought to upend our film-making on the art of joy-making. In today’s disparate society that we as a human race, being bombarded and separated by so many trivial technological outlets, film is the only channel to unite us and make us whole.
My experimental films are intended to be consumed with introspection. When my audience navigates their memories with detailed attention to their feelings, they can explore the complex emotions of my films with fluidity, and with better understanding of their own problems in life.
How would you specify your work? What characterizes your film?
I am an artist and view my films as art films or as part of avant-garde cinematic arts.
Why did you decided to become a filmmaker?
I am a multicultural and multilingual poet, author, literary translator, visual artist and filmmaker. My living and working experiences have given me diverse perspectives on world affairs. And through introspection, my retrospection strengthened. When I create, I think out of the box and believe the multi-vocal art media (including poetry, painting, visual art, and film) are in line with each other when non-diegetic elements are at play. I am univocal about current social geopolitical issues that have to deal with empathy and renewing possibilities. I embrace opportunities as they come and yet I am critical about things that could harm our humanity at large. I believe art films can render kindred humanistic elements to our society.
My goal as an artist is to connect my audience with his/her dream state. By creating art films, I offer viewers a way to form a relationship between their dreams and the collective unconscious. The power of my films resides in their connectivity to people who view them. When they resonate with their audience’s philosophies and beliefs, subsequently will allow them to be happier and better individuals in this increasingly volatile society.
Who is your role model?
In film: Alfred Hitchcock
Which movies are your favorites? Why?
Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: suspenseful with unmatched filming techniques.
Orson Welle’s Touch of Evil: visceral with unconventional lighting techniques.
Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon: everything.
Man Ray's Anemic Cinema: unusual camera angles and clever montage.
Where do you look for inspiration for your films?
Since my MFA years at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I immersed myself into the surrealist gestures that followed Dadaism. I measure my work with the works of that era, trying to find balance within our human nature and to make peace with nature. There also, Carl G. Jung, the psychoanalyst and philosopher whose beliefs and studies in Collective Unconscious, were instilled in many aspects of the very foundation of my past, present, and future works.
Which topics interest you the most?
I have incessantly wished the countries that I have loved and live in would share their languages and cultures, even distinctly, with no borders or racial discriminations.
I have always been a fervent student in the direction of time. I believe there is an order or dis-order of our time that goes hand-in-hand with our memories of the past, perception of the present, and projection of the future. Therefore, the direction of time has a significant influence on how we look at our lives in phases, or integrally as one, and how we interact with the world at large. Time, in the foresight of our life and fate, has become the one true thing about our identity. And through time, we can reach out to question our existence and re-live our experiences.
Those are the fascinating facets that prompt me to explore my creative work on a writing page and under the eclectic lenses of cinema.
What do you consider your greatest achievement in your career?
Being able to laugh and feel joy with my cast and crew members on a film-set amid all adversaries. And have my pen friends saying that they love the montage on one film section because it calms them… and that I am onto something…
Those are the most rewarding moments of my filming life.
What do you consider most important about filming?
Be thoroughly prepared during pre-producing phase;
Be keenly flexible during principal photography (film-shoot) days;
Be utterly organized in the post-production; and
Be kind to everyone who works and supports my filmmaking process.
Which film technique of shooting do you consider the best?
Anything that feels right: that gives you the ‘tactile’ vantage point of feeling, smelling, seeing, hearing and tasting, hence- sense memory.
How would you rate and what is your opinion about current filmmaking?
I can only opine on the indie film category, that we are very much under-funded and need more channels for good films to surface and survive, and ultimately to have our films in the theaters that are viewable for the mass audience.
I think someone needs to liaise in between the theaters with indie filmmaking world.
What can disappoint you in a movie?
One layer: for entertainment purpose only.
Who supports you in your film career?
My film collaborators, my casts and crews are my cheer-leaders.
Lately, I have a few poetry friends who are very much in tune with my film work.
--
-Palpitations of Dust is the Finalist: Best Experimental Film at the 2023 IndieFare International Film Festival.
-Indelible Winter has been featured in the UMass Dartmouth University Art Gallery Exhibition called We are All Contagious since May 2020.
-The Pines of Spring will premiere at the PBS (TasteTV) upcoming television series SHORT FILMS ON.
-Sparse won the Best Experimental Project & Best Film Noir at the 2024 8 & Halfilm Awards.
-In the Desert of Eternity won the Best Experimental Film at the 2022 LA International Film Festival.
-Diamond Dust won the Best Experimental Short Film at the 33rd IFS L.A. Film Fest (2023).
Your project has entered in our festival. What is your project about?
Sparse is the fourth film of our experimental film series ANN HUANG PRESENTS, which represents the summer season of a natural year.
Synopsis: The passionate pursuit of an art-filled life by a young woman drives her into a mesmerizing swirl of misdeeds.
Logline: By experiencing waking up from a dream and finding traces to make sense of it, the protagonist asks the audience to think introspectively and retrospectively about their own relationship with the environment they are in.
What are your ambitions with your project?
I strive to make films that bring out the interconnection of our daily living with our unconscious selves, mainly through our dream state. My long-term goal is to gain a wider audience and bring experimental films to everyday cinema and streaming platforms.
Tell us something about your shooting? What pleasantly surprised you?
There was an exterior scene we shot at a train station in San Juan Capistrano, by the Pacific Ocean near the city of San Clemente.
It was a late summer morning but the scene was about derailment and eerie fate, with the twist and thrill of a death threat and/or love suicide. The backdrop mis-a-scene gave the actors quite a happy mood that my DP and I actually wanted to avoid. Right past the mid-day, the sun set so high that the heat was penetrating. The actors just finished their walking scene at the train tracks and started to sweat.
By that time, I asked them to be lying near the tracks. Their faces looked a bit red next to the rocks, which was great in contrast to the overwhelming beauty surrounding them. It was a relief that the human condition could change the scene in such a dramatic turn. I loved the result the summer heat helped us in making the scene so iconic.
For what group of spectators is your film targeted?
Our target spectators are the ones who are film and poetry lovers that have an old ‘soul’ just like me. The ones who are living day-in and day-out measuring humanity within self and at large, who also have a deep appreciation for linguistics, literature, poetry, performing arts, cinematic arts, humanitarian efforts and animal rights in public policy, worldview inclusivity, racial and gender equalities, and solidarity above all.
Why should distributors buy your film?
Joy is the future of our race, and as a filmmaker, we ought to upend our film-making on the art of joy-making. In today’s disparate society that we as a human race, being bombarded and separated by so many trivial technological outlets, film is the only channel to unite us and make us whole.
My experimental films are intended to be consumed with introspection. When my audience navigates their memories with detailed attention to their feelings, they can explore the complex emotions of my films with fluidity, and with better understanding of their own problems in life.
How would you specify your work? What characterizes your film?
I am an artist and view my films as art films or as part of avant-garde cinematic arts.
Why did you decided to become a filmmaker?
I am a multicultural and multilingual poet, author, literary translator, visual artist and filmmaker. My living and working experiences have given me diverse perspectives on world affairs. And through introspection, my retrospection strengthened. When I create, I think out of the box and believe the multi-vocal art media (including poetry, painting, visual art, and film) are in line with each other when non-diegetic elements are at play. I am univocal about current social geopolitical issues that have to deal with empathy and renewing possibilities. I embrace opportunities as they come and yet I am critical about things that could harm our humanity at large. I believe art films can render kindred humanistic elements to our society.
My goal as an artist is to connect my audience with his/her dream state. By creating art films, I offer viewers a way to form a relationship between their dreams and the collective unconscious. The power of my films resides in their connectivity to people who view them. When they resonate with their audience’s philosophies and beliefs, subsequently will allow them to be happier and better individuals in this increasingly volatile society.
Who is your role model?
In film: Alfred Hitchcock
Which movies are your favorites? Why?
Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: suspenseful with unmatched filming techniques.
Orson Welle’s Touch of Evil: visceral with unconventional lighting techniques.
Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon: everything.
Man Ray's Anemic Cinema: unusual camera angles and clever montage.
Where do you look for inspiration for your films?
Since my MFA years at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I immersed myself into the surrealist gestures that followed Dadaism. I measure my work with the works of that era, trying to find balance within our human nature and to make peace with nature. There also, Carl G. Jung, the psychoanalyst and philosopher whose beliefs and studies in Collective Unconscious, were instilled in many aspects of the very foundation of my past, present, and future works.
Which topics interest you the most?
I have incessantly wished the countries that I have loved and live in would share their languages and cultures, even distinctly, with no borders or racial discriminations.
I have always been a fervent student in the direction of time. I believe there is an order or dis-order of our time that goes hand-in-hand with our memories of the past, perception of the present, and projection of the future. Therefore, the direction of time has a significant influence on how we look at our lives in phases, or integrally as one, and how we interact with the world at large. Time, in the foresight of our life and fate, has become the one true thing about our identity. And through time, we can reach out to question our existence and re-live our experiences.
Those are the fascinating facets that prompt me to explore my creative work on a writing page and under the eclectic lenses of cinema.
What do you consider your greatest achievement in your career?
Being able to laugh and feel joy with my cast and crew members on a film-set amid all adversaries. And have my pen friends saying that they love the montage on one film section because it calms them… and that I am onto something…
Those are the most rewarding moments of my filming life.
What do you consider most important about filming?
Be thoroughly prepared during pre-producing phase;
Be keenly flexible during principal photography (film-shoot) days;
Be utterly organized in the post-production; and
Be kind to everyone who works and supports my filmmaking process.
Which film technique of shooting do you consider the best?
Anything that feels right: that gives you the ‘tactile’ vantage point of feeling, smelling, seeing, hearing and tasting, hence- sense memory.
How would you rate and what is your opinion about current filmmaking?
I can only opine on the indie film category, that we are very much under-funded and need more channels for good films to surface and survive, and ultimately to have our films in the theaters that are viewable for the mass audience.
I think someone needs to liaise in between the theaters with indie filmmaking world.
What can disappoint you in a movie?
One layer: for entertainment purpose only.
Who supports you in your film career?
My film collaborators, my casts and crews are my cheer-leaders.
Lately, I have a few poetry friends who are very much in tune with my film work.