Meet Hsuan Yu Pan

 

We recently connected with Hsuan Yu Pan and have shared our conversation below.

Hsuan Yu , so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

I worked as a producer at BRIC TV, a Brooklyn-based community television station, for nearly a decade until the pandemic disrupted our operations. Living and working in New York City, a hub for diverse communities, allowed me to hear deep personal stories from immigrants. Among them, I interviewed Syrian musician Kinan Azmeh and Syrian-Armenian visual artist Kevork Mourad about their project Home Within, which uses art and music to document the journeys of Syrian refugees since 2011. Their work profoundly inspired me, motivating me to use my filmmaking skills to document the stories I encountered, preserving them and sharing them with wider audiences.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Inspired by the personal stories of immigrant artists and musicians I interviewed in my earlier work, I began creating documentaries focused on themes of immigration and migration.

In 2020, as the world shut down during the pandemic, I directed Alone/Together, leading a small, dedicated team. This participatory documentary explores how people found creativity in managing isolation. It features a diverse group of participants—artists, travelers, teachers, children, parents, and essential workers—grappling with and persevering through a global crisis. Through the perspectives of individuals in eleven countries, including the US, UK, Italy, Russia, Taiwan, Japan, China, Malaysia, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands, the film connects a global community responding to the pandemic. We collaborated with mental health specialists to host webinars on navigating isolation, recognizing depression, and practicing self-care. My goal with this project is to foster further collaborations that promote mental health awareness and support.

Since 2016, I have also been working on my ongoing documentary project, Hear, Eat, Home. This film highlights the journeys of musicians and visual artists from diverse backgrounds who have built lives in the United States. With Syrian composer and clarinetist Kinan Azmeh as the film’s spiritual anchor, the story delves into themes of conflict, displacement, and identity. The artists share their poignant art, engage in expressive collaborations, and bond over the preparation and sharing of homemade food from their homelands. Together, they create a bittersweet tapestry that reflects the complexities of the human experience in a world increasingly defined by challenges.

The film extends the conversation beyond refugees and immigrants to explore broader themes of migration. People move for many reasons, and Hear, Eat, Home aims to inspire pride in one’s roots while encouraging thoughtful discussions on identity and belonging. Now in post-production, we anticipate completing the film by late 2025.

To promote the project, we’ve hosted several events featuring music, screenings, and discussions, all met with enthusiastic feedback. In December 2024, I co-hosted a cinema and art showcase with Syrian-Armenian visual artist Kevork Mourad, which included a cultural food tasting. These events create spaces for meaningful exchange between communities and cultures. We are actively seeking new partners to help facilitate these conversations and build opportunities for cross-cultural understanding.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

When I was a child, my mother encouraged both my older sister and me to take music lessons. My sister excelled at it and eventually made music her profession. I, on the other hand, struggled to coordinate my fingers on the piano keyboard, and it took some time before my mom accepted that music wasn’t for me. Instead, I found my passion in drawing. I loved watching animation and was particularly drawn to creating comics.
Thanks to my mom, my sister and I were introduced to cinema at an early age. Those rich visual experiences sparked my imagination and helped me develop storytelling and visualization skills, which have become invaluable in my work as a filmmaker.
I believe that being open-minded and being always curious is essential for a filmmaker. Every experience—whether good or bad—can serve as inspiration on our creative journey, shaping the stories we choose to tell.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I am seeking collaborators for both of my projects: “Alone/Together” and “Hear, Eat, Home.”

“Alone/Together” explores the impact of a global health crisis and how society responds to it. Ideal collaborators for this project are individuals or organizations with the resources and expertise to foster meaningful conversations and develop solutions to the challenges we faced during the pandemic. While we welcome support for a wide range of discussions, we are particularly focused on addressing the mental health crisis, especially within the creative industry. In 2024, we collaborated with mental health specialists to co-host webinars, which received enthusiastic feedback from our audience. Many expressed a desire for more opportunities like these, and we are eager to expand such initiatives.

“Hear, Eat, Home” is inspired by immigrant musicians and artists who use their creative talents to share their stories and engage with the world. We are seeking partners to help us complete the film and to collaborate on impactful programs alongside community screenings. In addition to the feature documentary, we have a collection of related short films available for use in outreach and educational programs. We have already partnered with organizations to create community impact and are looking to build on this momentum to foster dialogue, celebrate cultural diversity, and inspire pride in individual and collective identities.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

credit of “Behind the scenes: group performance with Kevork Mourad painting on the wall,”-Mitsuhiro Honda

credit of “Group picture with George Hirose, Kevork Mourad, Hsuan Yu Pan, and Julie McElmurry in front of Kevork Mourad’s painting”-Ken Aragaki

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