Armed immigration officers are closing in. A delivery driver takes a chance on the nearest door and lands in a mahjong parlor. The house is run by three demons. They want his left arm and his soul. Go see “Fortune House” to find out what they are offering in return.
That is the film’s setup and it has its world premiere tonight, Friday, August 7, at 7:45 p.m. at Regal NoHo West as part of the LA Shorts International Film Festival. The festival is Academy Award and BAFTA qualifying and runs through August 12. Carpet arrivals begin at 7:00 p.m., with director Yihong Exa Huang and members of the team expected.
The film comes from Huang, a Los Angeles-based director, AFI Conservatory graduate and former VICE creative whose work tends to circle underground subcultures and immigrant identity. But the story did not start in a screenplay. It started in a research project.
From Research to Reincarnation
Executive producer Wei Ding sat down with The Hollywood Times ahead of the premiere and traced the film back further than most audiences will expect.
“I had a research project that I was doing mainly for other visual mediums, like 3D design,” Ding said. The work came out of a graduate program in Fiction and Entertainment, and it leaned historical. “Exa is the one that directed it and took it into the short film route.”
Huang co-wrote the script with Jeff Athey and directed. Frances Chiu and Huang produced.
Asked what Huang brought to material that had lived until then as visual research, Ding was direct.
“She brought it alive, because there was no way to have this format that contains it and shows it,” Ding said. “I also think she added a lot to the main character. Her and Jeff, the writer, really made the main character relatable and someone that you will care about.”
That protagonist is the spine of the thing. Forest Lin plays him, opposite Tony Kim, Alexandre Chen, Vivian Lee and Joel Chang.
The Problem with Monsters
The hardest creative problem was not the mahjong. It was the demons.
“We had to learn how to portray the monster in a human way, because they were once human,” Ding said. The film’s antagonists are not an alien species. They are a previous draft of the person walking through the door.
The monster characters were fun to watch, but it is not really about demons. It is about what happens to people who make it through a system that cost them something, and what they do to the next person in line.
Budget did the rest of the work. A short film does not get to solve its supernatural problems with a VFX vendor.
The Temple on the Hill
Huang’s director’s statement supplies the origin image, and it is the best key to the film’s logic.
As a child in southeast China, she followed her grandmother deep into the mountains to a temple that gleamed gold against a barren hillside, surrounded by rotting wooden shacks. Inside stood a wall of small wooden plaques, memorial tablets for the dead. Families paid to have names inscribed, lotus lamps lit and sutras chanted, hoping to clear karmic debts and speed souls into their next lives.
Her grandmother placed her own name in a slot and paid the monks to chant for her in advance, so that when she died she could skip hell and reincarnate immediately.
“The monks, collecting all this faith, all this desperation, had built the most lavish structure for miles,” Huang writes.
Years later, living abroad, she started recognizing the shape of that arrangement everywhere. Her conclusion frames the film: immigration is not a journey with an ending. It is a perpetual state of flux, a cycle as ruthless as reincarnation itself. Karma, in “Fortune House,” is not spiritual fairness. It is another economy built on desperation, where even a shot at rebirth carries a price tag.
What Comes Next for the Team
The team is not finished. Ding said the plan is to open the world out into a short series, one that can develop episode to episode.
“It could be more chaotic or individualized, like episode to episode,” he said. “And then tell the story in that way, expanding a little bit, and, for me personally, including more monsters.”
There is also a zine in progress that documents the original research alongside the finished film. Ding said it will go up on the project’s website once it is complete.
Production was small and, by his account, worth it. “The crew was very small, and everybody kind of knew each other,” he said. “It’s stressful, but it was fun. Every film goes through it. There were some chaotic moments, and once you’re over it, it was pretty fun to think back.”
Interview:
**”Fortune House”** screens tonight, August 7, at 7:45 p.m. at Regal NoHo West as part of the LA Shorts International Film Festival, running July 30 through August 12, 2026.
Directed by Yihong Exa Huang. Written by Jeff Athey and Yihong Exa Huang. Produced by Frances Chiu and Yihong Exa Huang. Executive produced by Wei Ding. Starring Forest Lin, Tony Kim, Alexandre Chen, Vivian Lee and Joel Chang.
Trailer:
