APAture Festival 2025

Featuring Kyle Casey Chu

Curated by Joe Morales, Qing Saville, Danielle Shi, Tim Tran

This year’s APAture Film Arts Showcase features San Francisco born-and-raised screenwriter, author and Drag Story Hour founding queen Kyle Casey Chu. Chu has received from Sundance, SFFILM, the American Booksellers Association, and Lambda Literary, and she has appeared on Vogue, VICE, MTV and more. Several up-and-coming Bay Area filmmakers will also screen their short films.

The theme for this year is (UN)BECOMING. Being human is to be part of a great transformational journey. By shedding outdated identities and practices that no longer serve us, we create space for personal and collective growth, allowing new ideas to emerge. Through reinvention, we reshape how we use art as a tool to heal, connect, and foster positive change. What are you (un)becoming?

PAINTED ONES
Directed by: Julia Nacario
4 mins 32 seconds

Painted Ones follows queer, nonbinary, and Bisaya immigrant La’On Canabe in their journey as a tattoo artist. Through their research and dedication to Indigenous culture as a Filipinx culture bearer, La’On uncovers and unlocks Filipinx histories through ink in Oakland, California. 

Smedley Drive
Directed by: Lark Chang-Yeh
5 mins 32 seconds

Smedley Drive is the name of the street my mother grew up on—a rural street in Pennsylvania, in a brick house built by my late grandfather. Earlier this year, I asked my grandmother to draw her house on Smedley Drive by memory, but she kept redrawing the floor and roof, over and over again—omitting details she couldn’t visualize. I’ve reconstructed her memories by hand-splicing 16mm home video footage from a family in Minnesota (purchased on eBay) and personal family home videos, and then scratching the footage using a needle to create an animation. 

生 Born/RAW
Directed by: Laura Dudu
6 min

Laura Dudu invites conversations on the engendered body by weaving their family story entangled with China’s One-Child Policy. Through intimate recollections—including a childhood memory when their grandmother revealed their parents had planned to abort them because of their gender—the film explores intergenerational trauma, reconciliation, and identity. Incorporating streams of consciousness and a missing interview recording with their mother, the work remains intentionally unfinished, reflecting gender and healing as an ongoing journey. 

Where I Unpack
Directed by: Chey Yen
4 mins

A queer and trans Chinese-Vietnamese person searches for home and belonging. 

BIOFUEL
Directed by: Ginger Yifan Chen
4 min

Late at night, two self-absorbed techies encounter a driverless car…

what remains
Directed by: Ginger Yifan Chen
5 mins

Over a series of photographs, Georgette Quan tells the story of her family’s shrimping business, from the age of the Chinese Exclusion Act, to its present day status as a state park. What Remains is an experimental documentary of oral history currently being distributed by Collective Eye. 

After What Happened at the Library
Directed by: Syra McCarthy
15mins

After What Happened at the Library is a 2025 narrative short directed by Syra McCarthy and written by Kyle Casey Chu & Roísín Isner. It is inspired by Kyle Casey Chu’s viral true story. This auto-fictional drama explores the acute aftermath of a real-life viral hate crime targeting a Drag Story Hour event at San Lorenzo Public Library: the inciting incident of the far right’s 2022 national anti-drag movement.