Film Independent’s Fiscal Sponsorship program opens the door to nonprofit funding for independent filmmakers and media artists. Donate today and help bring Cosmic Tortoise to life.
 

Logline

Set in a rapidly evolving city of Trinidad where everyone aims to leave for somewhere else, lonely Trinidadian-Chinese girl Lisa encounters a Chinese exchange student Xialin who invites Lisa to participate in her research of creating a “behavioral clone”. A platonic romance seeps into Lisa but their friendship is challenged by yet another long goodbye.

Synopsis

Lisa, a Trinidadian of Chinese descent meets Xialin, an expat and visiting university resident from China at the end of a late night party.

Lisa lives with her father, a middle-man in construction who handles contracts between Chinese investors and local politicians. Lisa and her father share little with each other. She also has an assistant position at a university publishing company. When her brother Mark, who possibly has a seedy career, is unavailable, Lisa also cares for her niece and Mark’s daughter, Kay.

Xialin studies involve ‘behavioral cloning’, a process of cloning senses and behaviors. Xialin explains it as ‘an investigation on the phenomenon of human synchrony’ – a process of imparting one’s personality and characteristics onto a willing participant. This, Xialin explains, does three things: firstly, it questions what makes someone someone? Secondly, if two people synchronize, does the bond indicate an actual closeness or is that bond inevitable because of a human desire to connect? Thirdly, what do you lose from yourself when you synchronize with another person? Xialin clarifies that changes during cloning can be as present yet as imperceivable as a fingerprint.

Lisa’s initial skepticism over Xialin changes over karaoke. Xialin offers Lisa to participate in a ‘behavioral clone’ experiment as a continuation of her own studies at the university. Lisa, who doubts Xialin’s experiments but acknowledges her own loneliness, agrees…
 

Meet the Filmmakers

Elenie Chung — Director
Elenie Chung is a filmmaker and artist, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. Her films, which move between narrative and documentary, focus on female relationships as a method of illustrating cultural disconnection and ancestral amnesia. Over the last five years, her practice has expanded to interrogating the effects of globalisation on the future of the Chinese diaspora.

Elenie graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with an MFA in Film Directing/Production in 2019. Since then, she has made several short films which have screened in international festivals and art exhibitions and was an artist resident of Praksis (Oslo, NO), Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, NY), Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) and she is a MacDowell Fellow (2024).

Elenie currently works remotely at Women Make Movies, a non-profit media arts organisation based in New York City, and with film organisations and collectives (Acropolis Cinema; Los Angeles Festival of Movies with Mezzanine; Shadow Kitchen) in Los Angeles to amplify films by non-US filmmakers.

She is currently based in Los Angeles, CA. eleniechung.net

Yi Meng — Producer
Yuki (Yi Meng) is a filmmaker from Wuhan, China. A UCLA Art History graduate, she transitioned to filmmaking, initially focusing on stop-motion animation before expanding to narrative and documentary formats. Her films explore female relationships, synesthetic connections between memory and reality, and themes of displacement. They have been featured in numerous Oscar-qualifying festivals worldwide.

Yuki is currently working on her first feature documentary, White Birds, which examines the intergenerational dynamics among women from a distance. The film is a selection of A-Doc Allies Program.

In 2022, Yuki founded Salon de Paprika, a boutique production company inspired by “Salon de Paris” and the Japanese animation Paprika, dedicated to tell stories that explore the grey-area beyond any rights or wrongs, to create characters that invites empathy beyond any villain/victim dynamics, to connect with the unheard and the unseen, and to support boundary-pushing artists and filmmakers through the formulation of a safe and inclusive space, both virtual and physical.

Yuki is currently based in Los Angeles, California. antiyukism.com

Make a donation to Cosmic Tortoise.

Contact

For inquiries, please contact fiscalsponsorship@filmindependent.org.