PRODUCTION TEAM

Pearl J. Park, Producer/Director
Pearl J. Park has been using her film, Can, to help break the silence about mental illness in Asian American communities, as well as to contribute to the broader public discourse about mental health and cultural competency. She has gone where few Asian Americans have ever gone — several national mental health conferences where Asian Americans tend to be underrepresented — to spark discussions about the inclusion of Asian Americans in the disability rights movement, and to highlight the issues unique to the plight of Asian Americans with mental illness. She has presented rough cuts of her film at the annual conferences of Alternatives (the largest national conference of mental health consumers), the Arizona Public Health Association, the Asian American Psychological Association, the National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy, the Asian Pacific Islander American Health Forum, and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. She serves on the Mental Health Board of Hudson County, New Jersey. She is a member of New York Women in Film and Television. Funded in part by the California Endowment, "Can" is fiscally sponsored by the Mental Health Association of California and the Independent Filmmakers Project. She serves as an advisor to the "Telling Our Stories" media project of the National Alliance of Multi-Ethnic Behavioral Health Associations (nambha.org) and on the Mental Health Board of Hudson County, NJ.

Motivated by mental health tragedies in the Asian American community, she embarked on producing "Can" as a means of social change. She has studied writing and journalism at Columbia University and documentary production at Downtown Community Television, (www.dctvny.org) the non-profit media center dedicated to social change through film. She is a member of New York Women in Film and Television and the Independent Feature Project. Born in Korea and raised in Miami, Pearl came to the NY metropolitan area 20 years ago after graduating from college from Florida International University with a degree in psychology. While in college, she lived in an enclave of Nicaraguan refugees, studied Latin American politics on her own, and became active in leftist political causes. This experience was formative in her development of political consciousness as a young adult. For the past 16 years, she worked as a freelance graphic designer for corporate productions, taking her to most major cities in the U.S., Canada, and Hong Kong. Though she is a visual artist at heart, she disliked commercial design work. Commercial art was very much about creating an image, sometimes obscuring truth, which was the essence of her values as an artist. she started to study documentary film with romantic notions of capturing "reality" and wanting to document "truth." She has always loved films as she believes that it is one of the most powerful ways to deliver emotional truths.

Kieu Chinh, Narrator,
Ms. Kieu Chinh is a legendary Vietnamese-American actress best known for her role as Suyuan in The Joy Luck Club, by Wayne Wang. More recently, she was the lead actress in a landmark film about Vietnamese boat people, The Journey from the Fall, by Ham Tran, which won the hearts of Vietnamese Americans in addition to garnering numerous accolades in film festivals throughout the world. She starred in more than 22 feature films in her native Vietnam and is one of the most recognizable and respected Vietnamese-American celebrity figures in the U.S.

Linda Hattendorf, Editor,
Linda Hattendorf has been working in the New York documentary community for more than a decade. Her directorial debut, The Cats of Mirikitani (www.thecatsofmirikitani.com) won the Audience Award at its world premiere at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. It also won more than 25 awards in film festivals around the world and was broadcast nationally on the PBS series Independent Lens. Her editing work has aired on PBS, A&E, and The Sundance Channel as well as in theatrical venues and many festivals. She edited the award-winning documentary 7th Street, directed by Josh Pais; Julia Pimsleur's Brother Born Again; Christina Lundberg's On the Road Home: A Spiritual Journey Guided by Remarkable Women, Nancy Recant's Jin Shin Jyutsu, and Danny Schechter's In Debt We Trust. She was Associate Editor on Frontline's The Choice '96, and on Barbara Kopple's Bearing Witness; Contributing Editor on POV's American Aloha: Hula Beyond Hawaii; a cameraperson on William Greaves' Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take 2 1/2 , and a researcher on the Ken Burns series The West. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and holds degrees in Literature, Art History, and Media Studies.

Xuan Vu, Associate Editor Vu edited the feature-length documentary film "Stealing America: Vote by Vote," by Dorothy Fadiman, the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker. Vu has directed and produced her own films in Costa Rica, Vietnam, and Taiwan. She has worked as an associate producer, outreach coordinator and archival researcher in documentary productions for WGBH's Science Now, Documentary Educational Resources (a distribution outlet for independent filmmakers), and Northern Light Productions (a Boston-based independent documentary production company). Currently, she is a full-time editor at Concentric Media, a documentary production company in the Bay Area, for Dorothy Fadiman. She has a graduate degree in Documentary Filmmaking from Boston University. She is fluent in Vietnamese.

Benjamin P. Wolf, Additional Camera Benjamin P. Wolf is currently the director of photography on The Learning Channel series, Shalom in the Home. He is formerly the lead cameraperson on the Fox Television reality show, Trading Spouses. He has also served as a Location Director of Photography on the PBS landmark series “Slavery and the Making of America” as well as the Director of Photography on the documentary “Losing It” about Chinese and American individuals living with physicial disabilities, filmed in Hong Kong and New York. He has been a cinematographer on numerous documentaries for “American Experience,” A&E, Nickelodeon, History Channel, “Dateline,” “Primetime Live,” MTV, VH-1, Discovery, Court TV, TNT, CNN, and Starz Encore!.

Ngô Thanh Nhàn, Ph.D. (linguistics), Vietnamese-English Translator Ngô Thanh Nhàn, Ph.D., is a visiting scholar at the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (CIMS) specialized in medical language processing. Dr. Nhan specializes in computer character encoding to revive the endangered Vietnamese ancient script of Nom. He is currently one of 15 people in the world who can read the script.