Review: HAAPI Fest showcases Texas filmmakers

By Hongtao Hu     6/19/25 9:29pm

On a hot and hazy Texas day, the Houston Asian American and Pacific Islander Festival devoted an entire block of time towards Texas filmmakers. This June 7 showcase was but a small slice of the two weekends where HAAPI Fest centered Asian artists in film and other mediums, capping its final day with a comedy show. 

Shorts ranged from intimate documentaries to paper stop-motion, and each held an indelible flavor of Texan identity. Here are five of this writer’s favorites.

“Closing Time” (dir. Sherwin Lau)

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A matter-of-fact but tender documentary of director Sherwin Lau’s parents, this film centers their immigration story from growing up in Hong Kong traveling to the United States and their eventual retirement after their decades-long work in the restaurant industry.

Through close-up shots where Lau’s parents dart through rooms and across sidewalks, there is a certain stillness in motion. A particular sense of time is evoked; you know the parents will have been retired, but their history is ever present. Lau speaks to you more as a friend than an advocate trying to pin down a centralized Asian-American identity. Here, he says. These are the people I love.

Score: 4/5

“A Hurt like Mine” (dir. Kahea Kiwaha) 

With lingering hallway scenes reminiscent of Stephen King’s “The Shining” and dreamlike sequences out of Wong Kar-Wai’s “Chungking Express”, Kiwaha treads through Keoki’s (Kai Johnson) life in a women’s domestic violence shelter with his mother Reina (Cher Alvarez). 

Kiwaha cuts between the maintenance involved in healing (eating too much cereal) and ongoing pain (a mirror-child who haunts Keoki) signify a precision in storytelling, and the set design brings a sense of quiet dilapidation that nevertheless highlights the characters’ care for each other. 

Score: 4/5 

“Halmoni’s Pot” (Grandma’s pot) (dir. A. L. Lee)

Against my misconceptions, the witty Halmoni (Alexis Rhee) isn’t cooking anything; instead, she’s buying cannabis for a grandson in this comedy short. But she’s not here only to buy, but to drive a hard bargain from an irritable weed dealer Jack (Haulston Mann) and his accomplice Sam (Wesley Han). 

In the car, misfires abound between the less-than-fluent “granny pothead” and the drug dealers. Through a tight storyline, the jokes slip in much subtler than this arduous pot-swap, and leave viewers with a hearty laugh even after the film concludes.

Score: 4/5

“Nirmalya” (dir. Aniket Chandrakant Dhavale)

“Nirmalya” opens with a grandmother (Radhika Hingwe) hurriedly interrupting the titular story about a pregnant princess. “It’s not auspicious,” she scolds the parents as they’re about to tell their daughter the ending. When the mother (Priyanka Shinde Jachak) and father (Saurabh Jachak) reassure her, the grandmother solemnly completes the story; telling the child that the princess gave birth to a frog. 

When the parents’ child is born with a single ventricle heart defect, the story coalesces around a central question: will they keep the child and undergo risky surgeries, or provide comfort care to give alleviate the baby’s pain  in the last days of its life? Some of the side actors are a bit stilted as they help the parents grapple with the decisions, but in shots such as those of the parents discussing with another family whose child had the same condition, latticed glass and a stone background imprint themselves upon both the viewer and parents as they approach their decision. 

As the crayon picture book read at the story’s beginning becomes a haunting omen of the parents’ experience, you wonder alongside them: what if the story was never finished? But the conclusion, as it always will and would be, arrives heartbreakingly. 

Score: 4/5

“it is now tomorrow” (dir. Mỹ Trinh)

And when Giles Corey was under the duress of stones — peine forte et dure — and accused of witchcraft in Salem, what did he say but “more weight”? In the best way, one can feel the pressure that “it is now tomorrow” exudes across the film, shots are tantalizingly long, yet you want them to be longer. Scenes may be heavy, but very deliberate.  

The story centers around Junie, a self-isolating 26 year old who rolls through the window of her childhood bedroom. Her mother died on this day, and she is joining her sisters to mourn. It is a hot Texas summer and dry; there is no A/C in the house. The sisters make dinner and sup with an uneaten bowl, an empty chair. At her mother’s altar, Junie lights incense, she bows to her mother more so with her arms than hips. 

Director Mỹ Trinh from art syndicate 86luck bends time and space for the film’s themes to flow in. While of an everyday flavor, shots are artisanally plucked and expressive: A sliver of a sister’s face hesitates in a thin mirror, a stringed “moon” light hangs underbackyard oak, overhead shots watch hands, then knives chop yellow onions and younger scallions. Junie, the middle sister, gripes upon how they’re cooking bitter food. Nia, the eldest, replies that bitter melon soup was their mother’s favorite. 

The youngest sister Kimmy (Gracie Blu) steps in to break up arguments, but the sisters still use mundanity to muzzle their tenderness and hurt another. “You look tired”, Nia tells Junie. Then , they argue over their 40 hour work weeks, accusing each other of themselves.

But underneath it all, the sisters display a devotion for each other and their mother that illuminates a bond: surely austere, but sufficiently strong. Under the night, a wide shot holds the sisters around a poker nightstand, cards folded around wine glasses, all of them dreaming, thinking oftheir mother in impossible quiet. Around them, the wind falls in like stones. 

“it is now tomorrow” is an incredibly careful film. It does not succumb to spectacle; it dwells upon the normal: normal houses, normal sisters, normal days. But before tomorrow comes for Junie and the viewing room is pitch-dark, one can feel the force of loss — that even in the most ordinary death, its weight is overwhelming.  . 

Score: 5/5

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