A River to Leave my Love
As a young Chinese-American mother drives her daughter back from summer camp, the long desert road brings back to life tales from the past.
A River to leave my Love sprouted from the magical feeling of driving home from the Sierras towards the coast as a kid. To me it was an in-between space -- between fairytale and reality, between the frontier myth and Chinese heritage, between the tenderness of feelings and the wideness of history, between family and the American Dream -- where the desolate landscape magnifies the pull of what has been left behind. I wanted to question, the way a desert highway questions, what going home means as an Asian-American.
Richard Shi
Starring
Cori Young Skylar Shen Anna Kuang Hunter Hsu
Director of Photography
Carson Federizo
Sound Recordist
Laurel Eisenmann
Lighting
Sydney Hsieh
Editing/ Color/ Sound
Richard Shi
2025