Asian Women Directors on Their SXSW 2025 Projects

As we wind down from last month’s SXSW 2025 and head into summer film festival season, we’re revisiting some of our favorite screenings from this year’s event — all directed and led by Asian women (some for the first time!) with powerful perspectives.

“Forever We Are Young”

Directed by Patty Ahn and Grace Lee, “Forever We Are Young” is a documentary that follows K-pop boy group BTS’s fandom, known as ARMY, which stands for Adorable Representative MC for Youth. To be clear, it’s not a film about BTS, but the band’s fans. 

“Through personal stories of ARMY, you get to know how BTS and ARMY evolved over the last 10 years,” Lee describes in an ATX Film Talks event hosted by AZN AMERICANA and Asian Pacific Filmmakers Experience. “In the last decade, [BTS] went from an unknown company to global icons, and how did that happen? [That’s] the question we ask in the movie.” In the post-screening Q&A, she adds, “Looking around the audience at a BTS concert made [me] question, who are these people? How did they get here?”

From the very start, Ahn and Lee emphasize that they are both OT7, which is fanspeak for loving all seven members of the group. This film is truly by fans, for fans. Both separately attended the same “Permission to Dance on Stage” tour stop in 2022, but found each other through mutual connections. Their collaboration flourished from there. 

“For me, it’s like, there’s life before seeing BTS live, and life after seeing BTS live. After I saw BTS live, I thought, this is something that cannot be described in words,” Ahn expresses. 

“Forever We Are Young” tells the stories of several ARMY members around the world as a way to describe the whole. We hear from journalists and scholars and fans from the Midwest United States to Korea. 

As these fans introduce their bias (fanspeak for their favorite), we get to learn about the group through their eyes. While my mind often goes to parasocial relationships, there’s something mutually beneficial about this connection. ARMY needs BTS, and BTS needs ARMY. Fans share how they grew up with the group, from supporting them during the early days of their YouTube content and their first Los Angeles show at the Troubadour, to pushing them toward global superstardom through different projects and movements along the way. 

“When you see the fandom, you realize that it is as diverse as the world,” Lee says. “[I] have never seen so many languages, nationalities, genders, [abilities], religions, all come together [for the love of] one band.” 

These aren’t just “teenyboppers,” the documentary clarifies — they’re adults with real jobs, underdogs, and people shattering expectations. We hear how BTS shaped people’s lives through their music, helping them overcome depression, accept their gender identities, and more. 

“[BTS] were saying messages in their music that [we] hadn’t heard K-pop groups do and perform and express,” Ahn articulates. K-pop fandoms skew more progressive, so it matches with the themes BTS sings about, like being critical of social systems and encouraging people to express themselves. 

There’s concert footage that elicits chills as you see and hear everyone singing along. But it’s mostly there to show the strong emotional connection between BTS and ARMY, and highlight the group’s powerful lyrics — and its willingness to show vulnerability on a public stage. 

“At a time when certain groups are being marginalized … BTS says, speak yourself, love yourself, all of those things. That message is, I think, what makes it so emotional to talk to the fans and why people always talk about [the climactical] events of their life, [and] also the communities and friendships they’ve built,” Ahn remarks.

The film moves in chronological order, marking BTS’ and ARMY’s milestones with songs, collaborations, and awards. Even if you’re not ARMY yourself and can’t recognize the iconic HYBE practice room or the BTS bus stop from the “Spring Day” music video, the film provides enough context so that it’s easy to follow. 

Fun illustrations and a bright color palette accompany archival footage and interviews to lighten the mood throughout the film. But the film isn’t always rosy in its outlook and touches on the different sides of the fandom, including its participation in politics and social movements — and its toxicity. “If you’re telling a story about a fandom, you can’t sugarcoat things,” Lee notes. “In the end, it’s part of the history.”

One of Lee’s first film projects over 20 years ago was a documentary about activist Grace Lee Boggs. Though ARMY may seem like a big departure from Boggs, Lee sees the parallels. “There are actually connections, like Grace Lee Boggs was an organizer, ARMY are organizers. Grace Lee Boggs was putting out radical ideas about love and values, and ARMY does that, too,” she observes. Similar to Boggs, ARMY brings different communities and people together — “it’s very grassroots.”

At its core, the documentary centers around friendship and community. One Korean fan featured in the film comments that ARMY met by coincidence, but this community was necessary. Another says that after becoming ARMY, she became special to herself. There are so many that share similar sentiments throughout the documentary. 

The film touches on so much in just 90 minutes, but it shows how real — both good and bad — fandom can be through the range of humans that make it up. It’s thoughtful and full of love and personality. And it’s so fun to see all the joy that radiates from this community in particular — not to mention BTS’ songs are actually bops. 

I may not be ARMY myself (though this film sure convinced me), and perhaps I’m biased because of my recent love for K-pop, but I could relate to these people and their admiration of these seven Korean men because I feel the same way about my own favorite group, TWICE.

“We’re fans of ARMY,” Lee asserts. And after this movie, so am I.

“Forge”

Writer and director Jing Ai Ng has always been a fan of white-collar crime and fascinated with art, forgery, and artifice. When she was a teen, she found out via Wikipedia that a distant relative had committed a white-collar crime, so perhaps that subtly sparked inspiration for her debut feature, “Forge.”

The film follows siblings Raymond (Brandon Soo Hoo) and Coco Zhang (Andie Ju), who run an art forgery operation in Miami. Their entanglement with disgraced millionaire Holden Beaumont (Edmund Donovan) leads them to create counterfeit masterpieces for his inherited art collection, mistakenly destroyed during flooding, that he intends to sell to finance his collapsing event planning business. All the while, Emily Lee (Kelly Marie Tran), an FBI agent in the art crimes division, investigates a new string of forgeries that connects her with the Zhangs. 

For Ng, the script is personal to her. “Forge” is about her own experiences being Asian American, she tells the audience after the world premiere. 

Throughout the film, there’s a clear theme of identity forgery that permeates the story. The Zhang siblings make the perfect duo for this crime because no one suspects them. Coco, our artist, is the talented daughter who left art school to take care of her sick father, and Raymond, the one behind the operations, is the smart, hardworking son who used to attend Duke. 

With the model minority myth, there’s “the assumption that you’re a good person or that you’re studious and are on the right side of the law at all times …,” Ng points out. “The idea of art forgery, the idea of [someone] not being fully who they say they are … this white-collar crime that deals with a lot of artifice and facade naturally plays into that theme.”

Even the dynamics between the Zhangs and Holden demonstrate the precarious relationship the model minority myth offers. As tensions and suspicions escalate, it’s easy to see how privilege and power can quickly turn against you. 

“A lot of the characters in the movie are immigrants and not white, so they’re constant outsiders looking in on Holden’s world, and I really wanted to depict that in every aspect,” the director says. Though the two families work closely together and develop a close bond, it’s almost as if a rug gets pulled out from under the Zhangs at the end, as they realize they will never be equals to the Beaumonts in society. 

Ng’s script is sharp and authentic, with funny Gen Z wordplay moments, and different languages like Cantonese and Spanish incorporated throughout. But it also offers an interesting perspective around themes of trust and duplicity. Trust acts as the backbone in Coco and Raymond’s relationship, in their exchange with the Beaumonts, and among the art world. 

“Trust is an essential element [in crime movies],” she reminds me. “It’s a trope and something that I love … because it’s like, does greed essentially get in the way of humanity?” Both greed and trust are human, she points out.

Her characters feel ambitious, but relatable. Sure, they’re morally questionable, but they’re complicated and real people with real desires. For example, I immediately was drawn to Coco as a character because of her cool confidence. At the beginning of the film, we watch as she cons local art dealer Sandy Baker (T.R. Knight) into buying one of her forgeries, feigning innocence. Once Baker leaves, however, the switch is almost instantaneous. 

When it comes to working with Holden, Coco knows she can get away with this deception on a larger scale — her art deserves to be in museums and she’s tired of being overlooked — even when her brother is hesitant. But as you get to understand her, you realize that it’s just a cover; she hides behind forgeries because she craves real love and perhaps, there’s some element of self-doubt. 

For Ju, “I just knew that there was something about [Coco] that I connected to so deeply and I feel like I understood [her] in terms of being an artist and wanting to be recognized for the artist that she is,” she gushes. “And then also just going through the world as a young Asian female and having certain perceptions placed onto me and sometimes feeling a certain pressure to follow that and then also trying to break out of it.”

As trust was being dissected on-screen, there was a lot of trust off-screen for Ng as a first-time feature director as well. She confides later, “Being an Asian American woman and a director, there are so few of us that sometimes you feel very alone when you walk into a room and it’s hard to believe in yourself, and you have moments of self-doubt. I think after this experience, I believe in myself more and I’m more confident in my abilities as a director.”

“Forge” is a fresh take on Asian American identity. It’s rare that you get to see white-collar crime committed by Asian Americans (though, Ng points out, one of the biggest art forgeries was actually carried out by an Asian woman). “There cannot be a single story [for us],” Ng shares. 

“Slanted”

Written and directed by Chinese Australian filmmaker Amy Wang as her debut feature, “Slanted” follows high schooler Joan Huang (Shirley Chen), who longs to win the coveted prom queen title. She’ll even do anything to do so — like literally turn herself into a white girl. 

Though Wang grew up in Australia, she spent the last several years in the United States because of her career. While the concept of prom queen and king isn’t a thing where she comes from, the title represented a key teen aspiration for Wang, as the focus of many coming-of-age movies. When the Atlanta spa shootings happened in 2021, the event dredged up experiences of racism for Wang. “Slanted” was born from her reaction of “Wouldn’t it be easier if I was white?” and the shame that came with that thought. 

The premise of, “Hey, what if this chick just turned white?” sounds ridiculous and comedic, Wang admits in the post-screening Q&A. But the movie proves that it’s so much more than that.

When we meet Joan at the beginning of the film as an elementary school student immigrating to the United States from China with her family, her small American town feels eerie and dystopian. Later, when her janitor father (Fang Du) injures himself while cleaning a client’s home, we get the first glimpses of Wang’s foray into body horror, which only ramps up from there. As we get into the meat of the story, we literally get to see the consequences of Joan’s actions as she changes her appearance, starting with blonde hair implants before she fully changes her race, and the toll it takes on her physical being. The movie is almost like Ling Ling Huang’s “Natural Beauty” come to life.

For someone who hates anything remotely scary, the film is actually quite tame in what it shows, with only a few scenes that really elicit winces. “If I had my way, [the film] would have been way, way more intense,” Wang laughs, citing the filmography of David Cronenberg and Michael Haneke as her inspirations. 

Wang balances the horror with humor and heart. 

Even though she leans heavily into the stereotypes and tropes that add to the satirical nature of the film, she explains, a lot of the racism that she shows throughout the film had to be somewhat subtle. Wang uses “Sorry to Bother You” as an example. “It’s always hiding behind genre or something else and it made me realize, I can’t just be so open about, like, this is a really uncomfortable scene and this is exactly what happened,” she says.

The film is absolutely hilarious in its jokes and over-the-top depiction of its white characters — from the group of popular kids at Joan’s school and their lunchtime salad-shaking ritual to the client testimonials at the clinic that specializes in Joan’s race-changing surgery. There’s also a truly iconic karaoke music video montage to an original song called “It’s Good to Be White” as Joan undergoes her operation. There are also several gags in the background that you might not notice at first, like the school’s wizard mascot that was Wang’s take on the KKK grand wizard. 

All of that gets interwoven with small details, like the nuances in the ways Joan gets treated as a Chinese American versus after she turns white. And while these details are clear, Wang points out a few others that are quieter, but still help further the tone of the movie. For example, the film was largely shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio until Joan’s reveal of her new self, when the dimensions move to widescreen — a reflection of how she sees herself now that her world is opened up and she has more opportunities as a white person, the director explains. 

A large part of why the movie feels so real and relatable however, comes from the performances of its two main actresses: Shirley Chen, who plays the Chinese American Joan Huang, and Mckenna Grace, who takes over as the white Jo Hunt. 

Wang knew from the beginning that she wanted two people, to avoid a “White Chicks” situation, as one member of the audience points out. “I want her experience to be real. I want [the audience] to see this girl — not [for it] to be some funny, weird thing. It’s, like, this is her transformed,” she clarifies. 

As part of her role as the modified Joan, Grace learned Mandarin, which she displays in one of her early scenes, trying to convince her parents that she’s still herself, just in a different body. While Chen is wonderful at setting up Joan for about the first third of the film, it’s Grace that gets into the emotionality of the character as her character struggles with the aftermath of her decision, especially as it threatens her relationship with herself and her friends and family. 

Wang says that the family drama helps ground the horror piece, and it’s probably some of the hardest parts to watch. 

I went into the film wondering how I could relate to Joan. Why would anyone want to give up being Asian? But there’s still something so raw and sympathetic about Joan’s story — so much so that the girl next to me was full on sobbing by the end. 

“Why can’t you feel happy for me?” Jo asks in response to her parents’ disbelief that she would do something like this to herself. “[I’m] being treated the same as everyone … isn’t that what you wanted for me?” To Jo, being Chinese is what made her weak in American society. But to her parents, she’s erasing her culture; her surgery takes away what made her special. 

The film makes it clear that Joan isn’t completely at fault though. “We exist in this society and we don’t have a lot of control with how the media portrays beauty,” Wang offers. “These tropes … that society has, they’re just things we grow up with.” 

While Joan has some fault in believing it, the director suggests she’s just a teenage girl. “We all remember when we were 16, 17 [and] the rash decisions we made. I wanted [the movie] to be about, this is the America, this is the patriotism, this is what it means to be an American, and [Joan] is not the typical blonde, blue-eyed, all-American girl that I think we all imagine …”

“Slanted,” which ended up winning the Narrative Feature Jury Award at the Film & TV Festival, is shocking, smart, silly, bold, and ambitious in all that it covers. There’s a pivotal scene toward the end of the film between Jo and her mom (Vivian Wu). As the two sit in Jo’s bedroom, her mother admits that immigrating to America as an adult was likely much easier. At that point, her parents knew they were Chinese and couldn’t change. But growing up as a Chinese person in America, it’s confusing. 

“Being American is not the goal,” she tells Jo. “I became my own American, and you’ll find your own American, too.”