Fishbowl

Director   Jacqueline Chan
Country   USA
Year   2020
Languages   English, Mandarin
Genre   Drama
Running Time   15 min

Fishbowl follows Natalie Song (17) as she returns home with her childhood friend, Joanne Cheng (18), after their first semester of college to celebrate Chinese New Year at the Cheng household. Navigating festivities that were once inviting but now tinged with a foreign animosity, Natalie finds herself trapped between the burgeoning attraction she feels for Joanne and the unnerving attention placed upon them by both their families. Behind coded pleasantries and the gifting of an innocent goldfish as unwitting accomplice, Joanne's ever-perceptive mother, Deborah, blackmails Natalie into ending her flirtation with Joanne. Natalie drives back to school the next morning, contemplating Deborah's unspoken ultimatum.

This film is part of the Homecoming series.

Director’s Statement

Fishbowl is a coming-of-age short film that explores the alienation from and the transitory phase between the home one grows up in, and the world one builds. It is within this transitory phase that perspectives shift and become scrutinized. The image of a fishbowl—a glass, transparent bowl that gives a seemingly unmediated view onto the housed subject within, a fish, yet in actuality, warps said view via the reflections and refractions of the water and curvature—perfectly encapsulates this coming-of-age experience. The protagonist’s world, like the fish’s, is held bare for the world to see, to comment, to judge. And yet, powerless to escape, the fish looks back. It is this exchange of looking and the power dynamics within these looks, that Fishbowl attempts to explore.

Director’s Bio

Jacqueline Chan (she/her)

Jacqueline Chan is a 4th year student director and cinematographer at UCLA. In 2017, she obtained her degrees in Visual Arts – Media and Art History from UC San Diego, where she studied under filmmakers of the French New Wave, such as JP Gorin and Babette Mangolte, and grounded her film practice in experimental modes. Born and raised in the minority-majority city of San Francisco, she is interested in the stories of those around her—whose lives are so vivid but are never seen. Interested in investigating the complicated dynamics and contradictory histories/languages within and between ethnic groups, she hopes to encapsulate a cinema that is at once unique to a kind of Asian-American experience and yet universally relatable.