“Angels near Death”: a conversation with filmmaker Hungyu Kuo
Hungyu Kuo has built a reputation on films that refuse easy answers—works shaped by surreal logic, dark humor, emotional rupture, and the quiet desperation of people trying to stay afloat. With his feature debut Angels Near Death, which premiered at the American Film Market, Kuo expands the intimate, psychologically charged worlds of his shorts into a full-length vision of Hollywood as both a dream arena and a slow-burn existential crisis.
Here, he reflects on identity, pressure, imagination, and the strange poetry of survival.
Q: What emotional or artistic question first sparked Angels Near Death, and why did it demand a feature?A: The film came from my uncertainty as a newcomer in Hollywood. I imagined the different versions of who I might become and turned them into six characters. Their contradictions required space—a short couldn’t hold the emotional worlds I needed to explore. A feature gave them room to breathe and unravel.
Unveil the unseen depths
Unveil the unseen depthsQ: Your tone blends surrealism with dark humor. What shaped that combination?A: David Lynch showed me how emotion can live inside dream logic. McDonagh and Östlund taught me to laugh at discomfort and cruelty. Surrealism expresses confusion; dark humor makes it survivable.
Q: How did your theater roots shape the film?A: Limited locations pushed me toward theatrical technique—emotion through dialogue, tension in silence, characters holding the weight of a scene. Theater taught me how to build pressure without scale.
Q: What creative risk pushed you furthest?
A: Committing to stunts and intimacy scenes. In the past, I avoided them. Here, I trusted the team and chose directness over implication.
Q: Which pressure of Hollywood felt most important to explore?
A: The conflict between dreaming and living. You chase meaning while juggling rent, rejection, exhaustion. The duality can tear you apart. The film carries the idea: We all need to die a few times to live a good life.
Q: How did the film push your themes of trauma and identity into new territory?
A: My shorts hold trauma tightly. In Angels Near Death, imagination becomes the release—the way characters survive what reality can’t fix.
Q: What visual motif anchored the film’s surreal language?
A: Los Angeles itself. A city on the edge of collapse, still breathing. That tension mirrors each character’s near-death moment of clarity.
Unlock hidden mastery
Q: How did directing change when moving from shorts to a feature?A: I learned endurance. Short films are sprints.
A feature requires patience, emotional continuity, and trust in scenes that need time.
Q: What did Super 8 teach you while making Extraordinary Achievement?
A: Fragility. Super 8 gives you one chance—no instant playback, limited cartridges. It forces you to trust the moment.
Q: What was the hardest production day?A:
A hospital sequence: twelve pages, no overtime, every second counting. It taught me to stay calm under pressure.
Discover what resonates
Q: How do you balance cultural specificity with universal emotion?
A: Emotion comes first. If it’s honest, it’s universal. The details reflect who I am; the feelings belong to everyone.
Q: Which scene captures your voice most clearly?
A: Four characters watch a film and reveal themselves through the movies they love. Cinema has always been a mirror for me—that scene reflects that truth.
Q: What idea did you protect most in post?
A: None. Anything that weakened the rhythm was removed. Letting go made the film stronger.
Emotions in symbols
Q: How does symbolism shape your emotional arcs?
A: Symbols express what characters can’t articulate. A recurring object or color shift can tell the truth more directly than dialogue.
Q: How do you choose what stays literal and what becomes surreal?
A: Clear emotions stay literal. Confusing or contradictory feelings become metaphor.
Q: What festival reaction surprised you?
A: At the Bad Student Film Fest, Resurrection created a mix of laughter and gasps. A cinematographer even kneeled before me afterward.
Find your true voice
Q: What challenged you most personally?
A: Staying alive inside the process. I had to stop chasing perfection and reconnect with the joy of making films.
Q: How does your Taiwanese background shape your work?
A: Not visibly in Angels Near Death, but deeply in Extraordinary Achievement. Living between Taiwan and the U.S. made me feel pressured to constantly prove my worth. That question drives the film.
Q: How did limitations strengthen the final film?
A: They forced intimacy and honesty. Without the option of spectacle, every choice had to come from truth.
Discover your spark
Q: When did the film feel “alive”?
A: Before I wrote anything—when the characters began moving in my mind like a daydream.
Q: Does The Indian connect emotionally to this film?
A: No. They come from completely different emotional sources.
Q: How do you maintain emotional honesty in surreal sequences?
A: Surrealism works only when rooted in something real inside me. It becomes a doorway to emotional truth, not an escape.
Q: What new storytelling muscle did you discover?
A: Emotional endurance—the ability to stay inside a story for years without losing connection to it.
Q: What do you hope viewers take with them?
A: A feeling of recognition. Not answers—just the sense that their hidden emotions were seen.
Kuo’s work sits at the intersection of dream logic and emotional candor, where surreal images illuminate the pressures people rarely voice. Angels Near Death marks his transition into long-form storytelling, but the themes that define him—identity, survival, ambiguity, and the elasticity of the inner world—continue to evolve across each new project. His cinema doesn’t offer escape; it offers recognition.
