About the Filmmaker and Poet

Ji

Born in Vientiane, Laos on June 21, 1969, Ji is Vietnamese and immigrated to the US with her immediate family in 1976 after the Vietnam War.

She grew up in Denver, Colorado and moved to New York in 1990, where she resided for seventeen years.

Largely self-taught, Ji’s artistic background is in painting and poetry. She started drawing at the age of seven, writing poetry at fifteen-years-old and made her first 16 mm film short at the age of seventeen.

She received her film training at SUNY Purchase College (Westchester, NY) in 1995 with  production experience in Experimental, Documentary, and Narrative filmmaking.

With natural leanings towards Art and Transcendental Cinema, her goal is to use Filmmaking as a vehicle for Truth.

This quest for Truth (through filmmaking) is largely how she compares Art Cinema to purely traditional storytelling (also known as “Craft”) in cinema.

Her views on filmmaking are closely in line with the creative experimentation found in Music, Poetry and Abstract Art. She believes Filmmaking has these Transcendental potentials, however, remains largely untapped.

To Ji, the powerful contribution of filmmaking (as an art medium) is to liberate and reflect the spiritual needs of a society and culture, rather than being only an industrial function of Entertainment— or Commerce.

As result, her stylistic vision of traditional film techniques involves using its industrial tools, craft and structure primarily as a platform for creative experimentation.

In that regard, she feels that film is still in its infancy as an artistic medium— despite its commercial popularity and technological advances.

Compared to other Arts, Ji feels that filmmaking is still trying to “paint by numbers” or bound to “making sense” whereas painters have moved beyond the canvas, and musicians have moved beyond the wind instruments— not only technologically, but experimentally as well.

She describes her filmmaking approach as being analogous to laying down musical notations or priming canvas for creative expression, “Everyone can read notes—but the rest up to Grace.”

Currently, Ji lives in Denver, Colorado.