Michael Leung – 2023 Feature Finalist
The Angel
San Francisco, 1940. As fears of Chinese immigration grip the U.S., an upper-class lady from Hong Kong finds herself cruelly detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station. As strange dark forces lurk among the deeply superstitious detainees, she must stay sane and survive their ever present terror.
Like many who live here, I am not native to these lands. I am an immigrant, and every generation of my family is one as well. My family’s journey is a tale of struggle and resilience, of escaping the turmoil of war to seek a better future in far-off lands.
My grandfather fled the horrors of the Pacific in WWII with his siblings, but they were soon separated. He was placed on a refugee ship headed for Australia – and his sister on a boat to Angel Island, California. But like many Chinese people seeking refuge in the West at the time, both Australia and the United States viewed foreigners with deep suspicion – and subjected all Chinese arrivals to grueling examinations meant to break their resolve.
While both were eventually granted asylum, the scars of their journey endured. It even shaped my own experiences growing up: I always questioned why I looked different to the other Caucasian kids, why my lunches were different and ridiculed, and why I had a last name that was so hard to pronounce. Even the Chinese kids were perplexed by me – I looked like them but couldn’t speak Cantonese. After years of feeling out of place, I now understand how these generational traumas shaped me.
It was on a pilgrimage to San Francisco to visit family where these feelings of displacement took creative form. I paid a visit to Angel Island – the waystation for all Chinese arrivals during WWII, and it made a profound impact on me. The cramped halls littered with long-forgotten belongings, poems of anguish carved into the wooden walls serving as a haunting reminder of the horrors experienced there.
I found it to be deeply eerie, as if the ghosts of the past still lingered in this place.
Imagining life here inspired me to write THE ANGEL – a horror film with a muted, haunting atmosphere that constantly threatens to spiral into a full-blown nightmare. Inspired by my Chinese heritage, I wanted to infuse the film with scary ghost stories that I was told as a child. From spectral entities to mysterious energies, my aim was to evoke the very spirits that my culture warns us about – the ones that are said to wander the earth seeking revenge for past wrongs.
Through the eyes of my traumatized protagonist, Mabel, we will join her in battling the horrors of Angel Island during her detention there, surviving the brutality of state-sanctioned racial discrimination and her fears of the supernatural. Separated from her family, she must find a way to stay sane and survive.
There is so much of my family’s story locked away in these pages, and my sincere wish with THE ANGEL is to honor them and shine a light on the enduring legacy of xenophobia and prejudice that still exists today. It is a story I’ve always wanted to tell but never pursued – and writing it has made me realize why I avoided it – it opened painful generational traumas latent within me.
As cathartic as it was to write, I hope it haunts anyone who reads it.
Michael Leung is a Chinese-Australian writer/director based in Los Angeles, where he earned an MFA in Screenwriting at the American Film Institute. He is passionate about writing horror and sci-fi, where he uses the lensing of genre to delve into the nuances of the Asian experience.
He was a recipient of the Screencraft China-Hollywood Fellowship for his sci-fi screenplay, RENDEZVOUS, which was optioned by Orb Media. His short script, FLYOLOGY won 2nd prize in the Screencraft Short Script Competition, and his coming-of-age dramedy, NEWCOMER, won the Diversity category in the Final Draft Big Break Contest.
He penned the short film, JIEJIE, which was an HBO Asian Pacific American Visionaries winner. It also won the Audience Award at the Short Shorts Film Festival in Japan and the Audience Award at the Taiwanese American Film Festival.
Most recently, he was a staff writer on a sci-fi streaming show for Alibaba / Media Asia, which will premiere on Chinese streaming platforms. He is currently developing a thriller feature, SHADOWING, with a Hong Kong-based production company.