Qhia Dab Neeg - 50 Years of Hmong Film in Minnesota

Write or create whatever you wanna create. Figure out who your ideal audience is, and don’t compromise. … Just write the stuff you want to see or create the stuff you want to see.

May Lee Yang and Peter Yang are Hmong American writers, filmmakers, and multidisciplinary artists whose creative partnership draws on nearly three decades of involvement in the arts. Both began their artistic work in the Twin Cities in the late 1990s, participating in an emerging Hmong American arts community that brought together writers, theater artists, filmmakers, and other cultural creators. May Lee is a writer, performance artist, filmmaker, and educator with an MFA in creative writing, while Peter identifies primarily as a writer and creative artist with a longstanding interest in film and visual storytelling.

Together, they are the co-creators and co-writers of Hmong Organization, a screen project for which they have also served as directors and producers. Their work frequently uses comedy, popular culture, and everyday experience to explore race, gender, identity, family, and contemporary Hmong American life. Rather than defining Hmong storytelling through a single cultural narrative, they embrace the diversity of Hmong experiences and believe that Hmong artists should have the freedom to tell stories that reflect their own lives, interests, humor, and creative voices. Their collaborative practice also reflects a strong commitment to mentorship, artistic community, and creating opportunities for others to contribute and succeed.

Continue to be inclusive, spend your time with the community, involve the community, and continue to document and do the best to record the world that we know today, but also pursue toward excellence in terms of storytelling, recording, and also the quality of your production.

Foung Hawj is a Hmong American media producer, filmmaker, technology professional, and Minnesota state senator whose involvement in media spans more than three decades. Inspired by recordings made during the Secret War in Laos, Hawj developed an early interest in using audiovisual media to document people, communities, and history. He studied computer science and media production and, after college, worked with Twin Cities Public Television (TPT), where he produced a Hmong-language television program from 1991 to 1995. He later established his own production company and continued working as a producer and media consultant while expanding his professional work into technology and nonprofit service. Now serving in the Minnesota Senate, Hawj continues to identify as a filmmaker and video producer and encourages younger Hmong filmmakers to remain connected to community, document the world around them, and pursue excellence in their storytelling and craft.

You have to stay true to yourself, have to stay true to the community. So, I built that relationship with the community.

Mitch and Yao Lee are a Hmong American filmmaking and broadcasting team based in Minnesota whose work centers on documenting, informing, and connecting the Hmong community. Mitch began working with media at a young age and has built decades of experience as a filmmaker, broadcaster, videographer, and content producer. In 2014, he left other employment to pursue media production full time, developing a practice that encompasses community news, interviews, event coverage, studio production, and commercial media. Yao works alongside Mitch as a production partner, contributing both on camera and behind the scenes while supporting the technical and organizational demands of their productions.

Together, Mitch and Yao approach their work as both a creative partnership and a community responsibility. Their years of documenting Hmong people, events, and issues have helped them build relationships and trust within the community, positioning their media work as a bridge between Hmong audiences and the broader institutions that seek to reach them. Looking forward, they hope to expand beyond news and event coverage to create original educational, cultural, and entertainment programming that provides new opportunities for younger generations of Hmong artists and audiences.

It all just started from acknowledging where we came from and who we are as a people, and celebrating our cultures, our stories, and being in the here and the now with what our stories mean to us, and continuing to document our own stories rather than looking at what’s mainstream. … Continuing to honor what being Hmong is, is so important. 

Kao Choua Vue is a Hmong filmmaker, cultural organizer, and founder of the Qhia Dab Neeg Film Festival, a platform dedicated to supporting and showcasing Hmong filmmakers and storytellers. Through her work, Vue has helped create opportunities for Hmong artists to share stories grounded in culture, identity, family, and lived experience. Her commitment to film and community storytelling has contributed to the visibility and preservation of Hmong stories while creating space for new generations of filmmakers to develop and share their work.  

When I die, I got something to leave for this world to see. And I’m proud of what I have. 

Yengtha Her is a Hmong filmmaker, actor, producer, and director who began making videos in 1997 while still in high school. A self-taught filmmaker, Her developed his craft through hands-on experience, research, and relationships with other filmmakers and industry professionals. Beginning with VHS and later working across successive generations of digital technology, he has produced films influenced by Hmong cinema as well as the Chinese and Asian action films he admired growing up. His filmmaking has taken him to China and Thailand, where he developed relationships with actors, stunt performers, and production professionals. Known especially for action, drama, and romance, Her has devoted much of his life to filmmaking and continues to encourage younger Hmong artists to learn from earlier generations, develop their skills, and create work of their own.

Don’t be the first, but be the one to continue the stories. We have great people in place...we have all these filmmakers, local or in Hollywood, who are paving the way for us. They can be the first, but you just have to be the one who continues the story.

Yeej Moua is a Hmong American filmmaker, writer, director, and production designer based in the Twin Cities. Born and raised in Montana, Moua earned a BFA in Media Arts with an emphasis in filmmaking and a minor in theater from the University of Montana before moving to Minnesota to pursue his creative practice. His films draw deeply from his own experiences, family relationships, and Hmong American identity, bringing Hmong characters into genres and stories where he rarely saw them represented growing up. His work includes Cotton Candy, The Wind Always Strikes the Highest Mountain, and Bites, and he contributed to the acclaimed Hmong American feature Bitterroot. Alongside his filmmaking, Moua has worked with Hmong youth as an educator and mentor, viewing his role as an artist as part of a larger responsibility to support emerging storytellers and help ensure that Hmong stories continue into the next generation.

Now I find a lot of my inspiration comes from this question: What can I contribute to the future? What can I contribute to the next generation? How do I keep our legacy and our stories alive?

Kang Vang is a Hmong American filmmaker, writer, director, editor, and media educator who began making movies as a child after his father brought home a camcorder in 1989. He developed his filmmaking practice through coursework in film, theater, directing, and screenwriting, as well as training and mentorship through organizations including In Progress and Asian Media Access. His films explore Hmong American experiences from within the community while connecting those experiences to universal themes of family, migration, conflict, resilience, and belonging. His works include Tou and Mai, which examined relationships between established Hmong Americans and newly arrived Hmong refugees, and 1985, a deeply personal exploration of the first decade of Hmong life in the United States. As both a filmmaker and educator, Vang views storytelling as a means of preserving Hmong history, contributing to the community’s cultural legacy, and creating a foundation for future generations of storytellers.

There’s something beautiful about being Hmong and bringing this value of Hmong...it is something that is innate to my nature and how I grew up and how I was nurtured that I bring to my sets, that I bring to the people I work with.

Kazua Melissa Vang is a Hmong American multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, photographer, visual artist, cultural producer, and public artist based in Minnesota. A graduate of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities with a BA in Art, Vang expanded her storytelling practice into filmmaking through her involvement with the Qhia Dab Neeg Film Festival. Her creative work draws from her experiences as a Hmong American woman and explores memory, identity, family, language, and the often underrepresented experiences of Hmong and Asian American communities. As a filmmaker and producer, she is committed to creating collaborative and culturally grounded spaces where artists can develop and tell their own stories. Vang is also co-founder of the APIA Minnesota Film Collective and works to support the growth of Hmong American, Asian American, and Midwestern filmmakers.

The heart of filmmaking is just my experiences—our Hmong community, our Hmong social issues, and just things that I experienced, the things that I want to…let out.  It’s the only medium that we can reach our parents with. And that’s the generation that we need to tell them…how they’re affecting us.

Pa Na Lor is a Hmong American multidisciplinary artist and experimental animator whose practice includes drawing, illustration, printmaking, textiles, design, and hand-drawn animation. She studied experimental animation at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she explored a wide range of approaches to visual storytelling. Lor’s films combine traditional and digital processes, incorporating hand-drawn animation, woodblock printing, handmade textures, and collage to create deeply personal and often symbolic narratives. Her film Crabapples draws from her childhood experiences and uses Hmong language and cultural forms to explore family relationships and intergenerational experience. Her ongoing work My Grandmother the Shaman draws upon family memory, spirituality, and an archival recording of her grandmother. Through her work, Lor brings personal experience and Hmong cultural life into experimental animation while exploring how art can communicate across generations.

As long as you have the inspiration, the aspiration, and you have the burning passion to tell your story—and you know for sure that that’s who you are—then go for it.

Moua Lee is a Hmong filmmaker, cinematographer, director, writer, and editor with more than thirty years of experience in film and video production. Inspired by movies he first encountered as a child in Laos, Lee later studied film and video production and began his professional career as a television photojournalist in Fresno, California. His first Hmong feature film, Xiong Po Ying, was filmed in Thailand, beginning a decades-long commitment to Hmong filmmaking. After moving to Minnesota in 1997, Lee worked as a television photojournalist before establishing Golden Path Entertainment Production and producing a series of independent Hmong films. Working during an era when filmmakers often handled every stage of production themselves—from writing and cinematography to directing, editing, distribution, and sales—Lee helped build a body of Hmong-produced cinema while encouraging younger filmmakers to develop their skills, pursue formal training, and take Hmong filmmaking to the next level.

The biggest thing about filming for me is the cultural aspect. And I believe that each generation, it’s our duty to preserve what we have for the next generation.

Yer Her is a Hmong filmmaker, educator, photographer, and videographer who began working in film in 2012. Originally trained in elementary education, Her developed his filmmaking practice through acting before moving behind the camera to create projects of his own. Central to his work is a commitment to documenting Hmong culture, family histories, and everyday experiences so they remain accessible to future generations. He has extensively recorded his father sharing cultural practices and knowledge, continuing a family tradition that began when his father documented their lives with a VHS camera and photographs. Her also teaches filmmaking to middle school students, encouraging young people to step outside their comfort zones, recognize the value of their own experiences, and use film to preserve and share their stories.

Don’t be afraid to share your stories, to use your voice, because we are a people with no land, we are a people with no country, but we have our voice, and that’s one of the strongest things that we can use. … Continue to tell stories because in a hundred years from now, that’s all we’ll have—our stories and our films and our movies.

Dan Yang, also known by his artist name Dan You, is a Hmong filmmaker based in the Twin Cities. His filmmaking journey began through his involvement with the Qhia Dab Neeg Film Festival, an experience that led him to study cinema at Columbia College Chicago. Over more than a decade, Yang has worked across experimental, narrative, and documentary filmmaking. More recently, he has focused on documentary work as a way to address the limited representation of Hmong experiences within the form. His work is grounded in a commitment to authentic Hmong storytelling and to ensuring that the stories, voices, and experiences of Hmong people are documented and carried forward for future generations.

I see that along with a lot of young Hmong youth around me, is that we’re kind of blending in with society now and losing our culture. And that’s why I’m trying to make this movie called Lost—trying to find my way back home, to find a reason why I’m Hmong.  You should be paying attention to the stories around you so you don’t miss anything. And that will make, in my opinion, your stories more powerful.

Dhoua Hli Vue is a young Hmong filmmaker who began making films at the age of four. Her first film, Memory Seeds, explored how memories are passed from one generation to another through the story of a grandfather sharing his memories with his daughter and granddaughter. Since then, Vue has used filmmaking to explore family, grief, healing, identity, and her relationship to Hmong culture. Drawing inspiration from Hmong films, stories shared by elders, and her own life experiences, she views the camera as a space where difficult emotions can be safely expressed and transformed into stories. Her developing projects include Growing Up, an exploration of loss and healing, and Lost, a personal examination of cultural disconnection and her search for a deeper understanding of what being Hmong means to her. Looking toward the future, Vue hopes to become a film teacher and help a new generation of young people develop the skills and confidence to tell their own stories.

I want the younger generation to take the torch that we have lit and run with it. Make it better, make use of the modern technology, the modern equipment that we have nowadays, and tell the Hmong stories—or tell your own stories—the way you want to tell them, in a way that’s true to you.

Ger Moua is a Hmong filmmaker, cinematographer, and director based in the Twin Cities. A 2018 graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Moua began filmmaking in 2015 with a commitment to preserving Hmong culture and language through cinema. Having arrived in Minnesota as a refugee in 2004, he draws inspiration from the Hmong films he watched growing up as well as American animation, cinema, music, and popular culture. His work spans narrative film and music video, with a particular interest in bringing Hmong folktales and stories to the screen in visually ambitious ways. His 2021 short film Sun and Moon, supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, incorporated professional visual effects artists to expand the visual possibilities of Hmong storytelling. Moua continues to create narrative and music-based work while encouraging younger Hmong filmmakers to build upon the work of previous generations, embrace new technologies, and tell stories in ways that remain authentic to their own voices.

We started noticing that we weren’t just making movies, we were telling stories, and people love the stories. They resonate with the stories. … It became making a movie because it was cool to do something kind, compassionate, impactful for the community.   

Chou Xiongis a Hmong filmmaker, writer, and producer and the founder of Tshajlij Productions. Beginning his work in 2011 without formal training, he developed his craft through self-teaching, hands-on practice, and community collaboration.

Working with minimal resources, Chou creates films that blend comedy, horror, and drama, grounded in storytelling that resonates with Hmong audiences. His work emphasizes compassion, humor, and shared cultural experience, using film as a way to connect communities and reflect everyday life.

I want to hear more voices and see more faces out there other than what we see in Hollywood. I want especially Hmong stories because I feel like there aren't enough out there.  It doesn't all have to be about the war. It doesn't all have to be about learning who we are, but it could just be the simple things of what we do, what we eat, what we think about.

Bryan Vue was born in Boulong, Laos and raised in Eau Claire, Wisc. He made his first short film at age 14, a fan of Bruce Lee films, he said the martial arts legend inspired him as the only Asian movie star of his childhood that he saw.  He received his BA in Psychology from the University of WI-Madison and his Master’s of Social Work from the University of Minnesota. He went on to work for the Wilder Foundation as a caseworker and counselor for years and not works as a social worker for Ramsey County.  The film bug never left him, however, and Vue went on to learn professional level filmmaking at IFP MN and perfected his art with family documentaries, short films and industrial projects. He founded Bird’s-Eye Vue Films in 2007.