“Two years of my life for 14 minutes on film”: The Story of ‘Mandarins’
How independent filmmaker Chelsie Pennello and her collaborators made an award-winning short film — and showed what it takes to be creatives in DC
“What I had heard from a lot of people is that in order to be a director, you need to go to film school, or you have to just start directing films,” said 27-year-old DC-based filmmaker Chelsie Pennello. The Rockville native thought she had found her calling in a film directing course as a junior at Syracuse University. She completed an 8-minute student film, but because she felt she didn’t know how to direct films outside of the school setting, she decided to go the route of applying to graduate film programs after college.
After she got admitted, she realized that she “would have had to take out $200,000 in loans” to attend, she told 730DC. “There was this sadness and also anger that I couldn’t go to my dream school because of financial reasons. And I was like, okay, I can’t let this stop me. Rich people cannot be the only people who can make art, right?”
The short narrative film is the result of Pennello’s decision to take the other route available: to just start directing. Shot entirely in DC’s Chinatown with a local DMV crew in 2022, it played at almost 20 selective film festivals last year, including the Academy Award-qualifying Cinequest in California and the New Hampshire Film Festival, where it won Best Short Drama. It also screened locally at Filmfest DC, DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, and DC Shorts. In an interview with 730 DC, Filmfest shorts programmer Juliet Burch praised the film’s “beautiful shots,” “superb cast,” and its skillful “combination of humor and touching moments.”
“For the first non-student film that I wrote and directed,” Pennello reflected, “it was as good as I could have imagined in terms of how it ended up playing out on the festival circuit.” Mandarins will now debut online on Pennello’s Vimeo page and on the curated indie shorts film platforms Film Shortage (February 27) and Retrospective of Jupiter (March 15).
According to Melissa Houghton, Executive Director of the membership group Women in Film & Video DC, the District is “probably the largest market of non-fiction film production in the United States” because of the region’s concentration of commercial network, media and journalism, and government commissioners of documentary material.The volume of homegrown fiction film projects, though growing, has yet to match this level. A particularly important gap, in Houghton’s opinion, is female storytelling in a “world where we don’t see particularly good representation of women in mass media, either behind the camera or in front of the camera.”
So, in a town not conventionally known for its independent fiction film output, how did a young, female, Chinese-American first-time director and her strong team of collaborators (all of whom have day jobs) manage to produce an artistically compelling, technically adept film that has the legs to keep screening to new audiences? In this case, the formula started with a dash of risk-taking, a ride-or-die with complementary skills, and the creativity that comes with working within constraints. Also, the District, it turns out, is a more hospitable place for realizing film dreams than conventional wisdom holds. As WIFV’s Houghton describes the local filmmaking scene: DC is “a place where you’re free to express your ideas and find somebody who’s going to help move them forward, even if they seem weird.”
Mandarins is a darkly comedic story of black sheep daughter, Olivia Chu (played by a spiky Christine Chang, a regular on the NBC drama New Amsterdam), reuniting with her siblings at her estranged mother’s funeral. While her offbeat eulogy (which is definitely not part of the official program) tries to acknowledge the contours of a complex maternal figure, her older brother (a stoic Michael Tow, who recently appeared in the Paramount+ limited series Special Ops: Lioness) and sister (the deliciously repressed Sarai Koo) want to stick to the script to keep up appearances. As the night passes, Olivia, alone at her mother’s funeral altar, seems to reach, on her own terms, some kind of acceptance of the complicated history that binds mother and daughter.
While Pennello drew on diverse cinematic influences for the meticulously constructed visual aesthetic and the plotline of a gut-punch family secrets disclosure, the theme of Mandarins came from a deeply personal source. “ Mandarins is about intergenerational trauma, and it drew on my introspection of my relationship with my mom, and her relationship with her mother,” said Pennello, who was also the film’s writer and an executive producer. “I really wanted to capture a moment in time about forgiveness, specifically within the context of that kind of trauma that’s passed on intergenerationally.”
Filmfest’s Burch thought Mandarins was especially accomplished in capitalizing on what she refers to as the beauty of the short story form. “There’s not a big backstory, and yet you glean a lot in 14 minutes about the lives of these individuals,” she said, adding, “I loved the complexity of the end, and that it’s not a tidy story. It really is reflective of life.”
Pennello. Photo courtesy of the filmmakers.
Pennello started writing the script in 2021 soon after mentally adjusting to the fact that going to film school wasn’t a realistic option. That realization “sparked the discipline that I needed and hadn’t had after graduating from undergrad,” she said, and “made me start writing Mandarins.” Pennello also started scouting locations, zeroing in on the low-ceilinged basement of the Chinese Community Churc h on I Street, whose patterned linoleum floors and folding chairs were so key to setting the film’s visual vibe and conveying the cultural specificity the story called for. “As a child, especially when you’re in an immigrant community,” Pennello pointed out, “a lot of it is spent in rented flex spaces and transforming [them] to whatever you need [them] to be for the moment.”
As Pennello finalized her script and “lookbook” and mood board, which convey the film’s visual blueprint and references, she started sharing them with potential collaborators by simply “reaching out to people and seeing what happens.” The soft-spoken Pennello, who says she actually suffers some social anxiety, admits “I was just doing what I could come up with. There was no sort of understanding or experience on how to do this.” This risk-taking attitude isn’t new for Pennello. According to Shannon Heaton, Pennello’s Advanced Placement Photography teacher at the humanities magnet high school in Poolesville (Maryland) she attended, “Basically, any art competition, Chelsie would enter,” Heaton said. “Any kind of creative outlet, she was unafraid to just throw herself into and be a part of it.”
Among the people she reached out to was Nathan Colby, who became one of the film’s directors of photography and executive producers (as well as its editor). Pennello randomly connected to Colby through ShareGrid, a sharing economy website to rent, buy, and sell camera equipment. Originally from near Annapolis, Colby had owned his own commercial production company and now works for a well-respected DC creative agency, experiences that fostered an extensive set of professional contacts. Through his network, Colby brought to the project the other director of photography Sammy Yoon, and a number of additional crew members, including production designer An-Phoung Ly.
Both Colby and Ly credit Pennello’s lookbook and pitch deck, which strongly conveyed her vision of the film, with convincing them to join the first-timer. DC resident Ly, who has been a graphic designer, textile artist, and photographer for restaurants, highlighted also that she “was really drawn to the fact that it was a woman, an Asian woman, who was writing and directing this short film.”
Wielding the same memorable pitch deck, Pennello used third-degree connections and cold calls to reach the three leading actors, who, based on their IMDb resumes, might have seemed like hard gets for Mandarins. “They really had no reason to say yes. To be honest, if they said no, that’d be like the logical and reasonable thing for them to do,” Pennello conceded. “I’m really glad they took the chance on us.”
Already by Pennello’s side were Tina Xia, a sustainable clothing designer and entrepreneur and classmate from Poolesville High School, and Corbett Blair, the film’s composer and sounding board for the various drafts of the script, who also attended Poolesville for a time — though he and Pennello, didn’t really connect until she was looking for some music for film projects in college.
By early 2022, with this core team assembled, Mandarins began crowd-sourcing production funds with a tongue-in-cheek video “ Why Should You Give $20,000 to a Bunch of Millennial Freaks?,” raising almost that amount from more than 150 contributors. Plus, of course, the filmmaking team putting in some sweat equity — that is, free or reduced-rate labor because of the opportunity to challenge themselves artistically. And because of the sense of shared purpose. “Anybody who was on set was someone who was pretty committed to the project emotionally,” Colby commented. Ly noted that, from her perspective, an additional motivation was the “ethos of the team that we are uplifting other women and uplifting other people of color.”
The use of the single location at the Chinese Community Church helped with the budget, allowing the team to spend plenty of time mapping out their shots in pre-production so they could efficiently use the time on set. The filmmakers took the challenge of breaking up the physical space and distinguishing moods and the passage of time through changing the lighting and varying the shot angles.
Behind the scenes on Mandarins. Courtesy of filmmakers.
Keeping the production small and nimble was possible, Pennello and others agreed, because DC’s limited fiction film scene forces film crew members to learn to be generalists who can wear multiple hats. Colby noted, for instance, that the set’s gaffer (chief electrician) Jiwon Baeq, who is himself a director of photography on other projects, served as an additional thought partner on set figuring out “how to make what limited equipment and crew we have work” to craft the looks they wanted. Composer Blair also did the film’s sound mix. On set, he served as script supervisor, overseeing continuity between shots (though he admits a large part of the job was distributing snacks and water).
Perhaps as importantly, fitting the puzzle pieces together to make a high-concept story on a tiny budget comes down to a certain we’re-in-this-together frame of mind. Blair has found that fellow DC creatives are “always super eager to do cool passion project stuff because they’ll get really excited about it,” continuing, “We’ve all been able to help each other make these projects. It’s very collaborative. And I think part of the reason is it’s a small scene.”
Reflecting on the whole filmmaking process, Pennello sometimes is in awe of what it took to make Mandarins. “I worked on it for two years of my life for 14 minutes on film.” Colby called the film “the little steam engine that could. I was so proud of us for even accomplishing it, let alone making something that is an objectively good film.” Aside from a final product the team is happy with and has fared well in festivals, there have been other outcomes that are as meaningful. About her Mandarins crew-mates, Pennello gushed, “They’re all like my best friends now because I worked on this thing for so long with them, even though I only met them two years ago.”
Over those two years of writing and shooting Mandarins, Pennello didn’t share with her mother the story she was working on. The night before screening it for her, she’d even had a nightmare about how she might react. In reality, Pennello got, she recounted, “probably the best response I could have had from her. She said she started crying in [the screening], and it made her think about her relationship with her mom and how her mom never told her that she loved her and she really wished she had. It was very full circle.”
Still from Mandarins. Courtesy of the filmmakers.
Originally published at https://medium.com on February 27, 2024.
