To Become the Sky: A Conversation with Jess X. Snow

Queerness is reflected in my art, in my own being, and in the lives of many people who make up my chosen family. But rather than focusing on queer sexuality or “coming out” stories, I explore queerness as a chosen community that refuses to dispose of one another. As a nonhierarchical way of remaining in intimate kinship with the earth.

I also think queer experiences expand our capacity to accept failure. My characters are outsiders who are always “failing”: failing to perform for their partner, the mother, the school system, the state—which leads to their breaking points. I explore these breaking points as portals to immense wisdom. Each portal an opportunity to create a chosen family when the one that birthed you failed, an opportunity to imagine otherwise.

Yes, that’s totally right. She’s experiencing post-traumatic stress, where trauma stays in the body long after it happened. I wanted to create a metaphor for disassociation through teleportation; Jia, played by Poppy Liu, at the first feeling of discomfort—even with a new trustworthy partner—unwillingly disassociates into a world where she becomes one with flora, inseparable from nature. 

After her eventual healing, she ultimately earns the ability to have more agency over her teleportation and bring her partner along with her into this sanctuary. Jia’s trauma never fully leaves her. Safe Among Stars explores an eastern, holistic approach to trauma healing that teaches us to befriend the trauma, move with it, until we can work with its wisdom and power on our own terms.

I think the fusion of music and visuals form the lifeblood of a film. Working seamlessly with the visceral 16 mm and digital cinematography by Zamarin Wahdat, and vibrant costume design by Sueann Leung, composer and musical director Lia Ouyang Rusli created a vibrant and textured original score and produced the songs. Kyoko Takenaka, who plays Sky’s friend and eventual bandmate, Miyo, wrote and performs in the culminating song: “If no one sees our light, we will see each other’s.”

We also included an old Chinese folk song that my parents used to sing to me when they were still together. In the climax, Sky sings it to their father to force him to remember them. Little Sky speaks to how music has the power to bring my parents’ generation of Chinese families together, even when they can’t see eye to eye, whereas my generation uses music to find their chosen family, the way Sky found Miyo through a performance, in an otherwise homophobic world. Little Sky is an ode to the power of music to build community and soothe even the deepest of familial wounds.

I Wanna Become the Sky explores the idea of a dragon within oneself that must be repressed as an apt metaphor for how marginalized people have had to assimilate in order to survive empire. We’re taught to hide our queerness, our neurodivergence, our failures, and our radical ideas because they threaten white supremacy. But it is precisely that force that fuels the imagination necessary to resist this world and build another. 

I wanted to put myself into the shoes of an actor to understand what an actor must do to deliver a visceral performance. I’m grateful to have had the support of an experienced scene partner, Joecar Hanna, and a codirector, traci kato-kiriyama, who after each take would ask me to be more present, to feel deeper. It was cathartic to me because I was raised to suppress my own emotions and always be a container to hold those of others. By playing the protagonist, I had to be present. I had to give myself permission to release my own dragon, which took the form of orange particles coming out of my chest animated by Jeremy Leung. This healing experience was one of the moments where I experienced what you call “a revolution of the mind,” where acting under traci’s direction enabled me to return to my body so I can sharpen my imagination and be of better service to the collective.

To interrogate the stigma around mental health in my community, I wanted to tell a story where even the healers and providers are allowed to break down and learn to receive healing in times of crisis. Of course, during COVID, there was an escalation of anti-Asian violence, especially in Chinatowns and Chinese medicine shops. In Roots [made with the film and literary production house Tierra Narrative], we see how two very different queer Asian American femmes approach healing from such violence—Zia (played by CHamoru actor alyxåndra ciale) through the external act of mural-making and organizing a group of Black and brown people to provide mutual aid, and Kai by retreating into their own world of diasporic herbs. The healing power of Kai’s mother’s Chinese medicine and her partner’s invitation into the power of community art create a kind of symbiosis. The lush 16 mm film cinematography by Sheldon Chau and an uplifting original score by treya lam immerse viewers into a story about how healing can reunite a community in crisis.

My aunt and grandma are acupuncturists and Chinese medicine doctors. However, it was only later in life that I discovered acupuncture as an integral part of my own healing journey. Roots is an ode to this intergenerational healing practice.

I believe that flora and fauna and even minerals actually feel. In my films, I wanted to grant them the same reverence as humans. This we must do in both our storytelling and practice of living if we’re serious about climate justice. The plant and spirit worlds are brought to life in my films through integrating the sound design into the beginning of the creative process. In Roots That Reach Toward the Sky [sound designed and mixed by Yiming Zhang and Haina Zhou], we used sound to immerse viewers in Jia’s experience of noise sensitivity after her window is broken and vandalized. During a panic attack she seeks support from nature by holding on to a resilient plant growing from a crack in the concrete. In Safe Among Stars, I worked with the sound designer Paul Wyderka to create a unique architecture in Jia’s plant-filled sanctuary she teleports to—recalling a church in a dark corner of the mind. We did this through multiple layers of ambient nature sounds, convolution reverb, and delay.

Cinema has the power to show us different ways of experiencing time beyond what is linear: geologic time, spirit time, dream time, and plant time. Experiencing these different tiers of time draws a bridge between the human and nonhuman worlds, which expands our ability to imagine the undoing of Western hierarchy.

My shorts finding a home on the Criterion Channel closes a decade-long journey. Now I’m moving into narrative features. We plan on shooting my debut fiction feature, When the River Split Open, at the end of this year. It is a surreal road movie that follows a nonbinary Chinese American who reunites with their maternal family in China’s Poyang Lake region, where they discover a family secret that launches them on a spiritual odyssey to find the truth about their estranged father.

I’m also in early development for my second feature: an erotic horror film about a timid Chinese American PhD student who encounters a utopian ghost community from the Chinese Exclusion era that alters the course of her life. You once wrote: “Sometimes the discovery of the self is produced in struggle, collective struggle for change.” I want to put the audience in the shoes of a protagonist who experiences an awakening that is as personal as it is political when she’s thrust into both the horrors and wonders of her untold history.