Natalie A. Chao

Natalie A. Chao is a filmmaker and visual artist who completed her B.A. degree in Film Production at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, with a focus in cinematography. Born, raised and currently based in Hong Kong, she is interested in bridging the gap between realism and poetry in order to tell stories through a more engaged and intentional gaze, one that can map out our memories, not draw lines between camera and subject, identity and politics. Being raised in a city caught in perpetual change, she searched for a means to articulate her thoughts and attitudes. Film naturally became her consummate mode of expression. Behind the camera, she felt entirely comfortable in encapsulating her world with all its incongruities.

In the context of Hong Kong’s ongoing political crisis, Chao questions whether a collective gaze is possible, and is engaging with what it means to create a living documentary, one that seeks to do more than reducing ourselves to numbers on a statistic, politicized events on a historical timeline. Why do we want to remember? Who is the archive for? These are the questions that shape the experience of filming her first feature-length documentary.

Natalie's documentary short, TO KNOW HER, was an Official Selection at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Filmed decades apart on the same miniDV camcorder, TO KNOW HER is an poetic exploration of Chao's family’s relationship with her mother, who passed away when she was 14 years old to clinical depression. She is also a 2020 Sundance Ignite x Adobe Fellow.