By Cameron Lee
September 11, 2025
After a multi-year hiatus, the Charlotte Asian Film Festival returns this weekend to the The Dubois Center at UNC Charlotte Center City. Originally co-founded in 2017 by film enthusiast Anand Kothari, the festival has been revived for 2025 through the efforts of a new organizing team which includes Ann Gonzales of the Carolinas Asian-American Chamber of Commerce, filmmaker and photographer Mark Borja, Minh Ngo of Mint Hill Marketing, and Thong Nguyen-Vu, a recent UNC Charlotte film studies graduate.
The one-day event will take place Saturday, September 13, followed by an after-party at MAYA VP Studios, the city’s first full-service virtual production facility. More than 30 short films and features from across the globe will be screened, offering an expansive look at the Asian diaspora through the lens of local, national, and international filmmakers.
Representation and the Power of Storytelling
In the last decade, Asian filmmakers have made waves in Hollywood with groundbreaking works such as Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019), Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (2020), and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), which won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture. Yet, despite these milestones, Asian directors, writers, and producers remain underrepresented in the U.S. film industry. That’s why festivals like Charlotte Asian Film Festival matter.
“Films have their own unique place in sharing culture, and I think that’s a very powerful medium,” Kothari said. “It provides that storyline which otherwise someone may miss.”
For filmmaker Quyên Nguyễn-Lê, a USC film school graduate who will screen three films — Threads, Teb Chaw, and The Market — at this year’s festival, storytelling through film is vital to her identity. A second-generation Vietnamese American raised in Los Angeles, Nguyễn-Lê grew up absorbing narratives about the Vietnam War, most often through American-made films like Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket, which failed to reflect her family’s perspective.
The turning point came when she watched Journey from the Fall, a 2006 independent film by Vietnamese director Hàm Trần about refugees after the fall of Saigon.
“It was the first time I saw a story that felt like, ‘oh, this is my family,’” Nguyễn-Lê recalled. “Everyone was crying in the theater. And it made my parents tell me stories I never knew before.”
Universal Themes, Local Connections
Nguyễn-Lê has since created a body of work centered on Asian experiences, including the film series Southeast Asian American Journeys, produced in partnership with SEARAC and the Center for Asian American Media. Her short film Threads, shot largely in Greensboro, explores the Montagnard refugee community in North Carolina — one of the largest outside Vietnam. Many Montagnards fought alongside U.S. Special Forces during the Vietnam War and later resettled in the Piedmont region, where affordable housing and refugee agencies provided new beginnings.
The Charlotte Asian Film Festival embraces this global-to-local storytelling arc. Of the films being showcased, over a dozen countries are represented, including Japan (The Wish), Korea (Coffee Place, The Bad Daughter), Mongolia (Fish), China (Beetle Summer, The Dissolving Silhouette), India (Patakha, Kaju Katli), Philippines (Saint Vegas), Indonesia (The Prayer), Iran (The Last Night), Kyrgyzstan (Golden Fish), Canada (Kung Fu Dancing), and Taiwan (Parallel).
Charlotte Stories on Screen
The festival also shines a spotlight on homegrown voices. Festival co-organizers Mark Borja and Thong Nguyen-Vu also have submissions in this year’s event, including a short documentary on Le’s Sandwiches & Cafe titled The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same: Le’s Banh Mi. The five-minute film highlights the Nguyen family and their journey to becoming one of Charlotte’s staple sandwich shops. For Nguyen-Vu, a Vietnamese American who grew up with fond memories of eating banh mi at the shop as a child, it was a fitting subject for the UNC Charlotte film studies major.
“It was just a piece of my history, and our history, that ended up intertwining,” Nguyen-Vu said. “And it turns out they have a cool story, and I wanted to tell it.”
Borja, who grew up in Mooresville, has been part of the Charlotte community as a photographer since 2010 and has also participated as a filmmaker in the 48 Hour Film Festival in past years. His submission offers a snapshot of several Asian businesses that benefited from Charlotte’s Beyond Open Grant, which supported many entrepreneurs post-pandemic.
Additional locally made films include Where Will You Go by Nuwuann Sabella, Won’t You Be My Dumpling? by Jinna Kim, and Vocafoli by Stefan K. DiMuzio.
After the Film Festival, It’s the After Party
The festival will kick off with screenings at 10:00 a.m. in two rooms, running until 2:00 p.m., followed by a panel discussion on the Southeast Asian American Journeys film series. Cultural performances will begin at 2:00 p.m., with an awards ceremony from 2:15 to 3:00 p.m. The celebration continues with the official after-party at MAYA VP Studios from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m., featuring food trucks Banh Mi Brothers and Pinoy Plates, drinks, local vendors, and studio tours. Music videos, shorts, and animated works will also be showcased on the studio’s massive LED wall, creating a vibrant backdrop for post-festival networking.
The Charlotte Asian Film Festival will take place on Saturday, September 13, from 9:45 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the Dubois Center at UNC Charlotte Center City (320 East Ninth Street, Charlotte, NC 28202), followed by the after-party at MAYA VP Studios (1891 Scott Futrell Dr, Charlotte, NC 28208). Tickets are $14.64 and include admission to both the film festival and the after-party.
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