Vera Miao is a badass. I can only image she’s the kind of girl other girls want to be around — and flat-out be. Miao, who started in Hollywood as an actor, now takes on another calling: directing. A little background: She’s an Asian American filmmaker with immigrant parents and she also identifies as queer. It’s safe to say the Hollywood odds aren’t exactly in her favor. Still, Miao, a true lover of storytelling, works tirelessly to get others like her on screen and behind the scenes. Her latest endeavor is the horror anthology series Two Sentence Horror Stories, premiering at Tribeca Film Festival’s “N.O.W.: Out of this World: Female Filmmakers in Genre” on April 29. In the series (which she wrote, produced, and directed), her mission is pretty clear.
“It’s profound to treat people we never really see on screen as fully-realized, complex, three-dimensional characters who live in a context,” she explains. “All I have to do is that and I feel like I’m already contributing.” Although her work isn’t autobiographical, it comes from experiences and a viewpoint she understands — namely being an Asian American citizen of immigrant parents. And a profound Asian American viewpoint is an extreme rarity in Hollywood.
