Director and Director of Photography Shan Jiang on HyperRealism, Human Connection, and Building a Cinema of His Own

From childhood experiments with a family camcorder to directing two feature films in Los Angeles, Shan Jiang has spent years building a visual language around heightened naturalism, emotional observation, and the belief that technology should never replace the human act of looking.

For Shan Jiang, becoming a director was never the result of a single career decision.

Long before he studied filmmaking at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Jiang had moved through drawing, painting, animation, storyboarding, photography, writing and eventually production design. Each discipline brought him closer to the same question: how can a film capture not simply what happens to a person, but what it actually feels like to be that person?

Today, Jiang works primarily as a Director and Director of Photography. He wrote, directed and served as Director of Photography on the 87‑minute narrative feature So Far and From Now On, which had its world premiere at the 2026 Philadelphia Latino Arts & Film Festival and later received Best International Feature at FICTLAX in Mexico and Best Narrative Feature at the Kookai International Film Festival. He also directed and photographed the feature documentary Little Something. Earlier in his career, Jiang served as a Production Designer on Robin Wang’s Neither Donkey nor Horse, which received the Narrative Bronze Medal at the 2024 Student Academy Awards.

Yet Jiang sees those disciplines less as separate professions than as different ways of approaching the same object: a living, breathing film.

We spoke with him about where that approach came from, the idea he calls hyper‑realism, why directing and photography sometimes need to belong to the same person, and why he believes cinema has an increasingly important role in preserving human attention.

When did you first realize you wanted to direct films? Was there a particular moment?

There wasn’t one clean moment. It accumulated over a very long time.

Visual things came first for me. I loved drawing when I was very young, and when I was around twelve my father bought a DV camera. I started using it with family and friends, sometimes imitating shooting games, sometimes recording little situations from daily life. What fascinated me was not really the camera itself. It was the feeling that once performance, framing and an imagined situation came together, I could enter another world and completely forget time.

By fifteen I was watching films constantly. I became especially interested in films that had very individual voices. I started discovering American films from the 1970s, independent films from the 1990s, and eventually much earlier cinema. Before I was sixteen I wrote my first screenplay.

What changed for me was realizing that a story could contain someone’s private experiences, emotions and observations of the world without explaining all of them directly. A character walks into a room, talks to somebody, maybe says very little, but somehow the entire condition of that person’s life can be present in the air. When I understood that cinema could do that, directing became less like a career choice and more like a destination.

I studied design and later animation because those were practical ways for me to keep moving closer to film. During college I was reading, watching cinema from different countries and periods, organizing film events, making shorts and experimenting with photography. At a certain point I understood that writing, painting, animation, photography and design were not detours. They were all pieces of the same education I wanted as a director.

Production Design became a major part of your early professional career. Why move from that into directing and Director of Photography work?

Production Design taught me an enormous amount because you are constructing the physical reality that every other department has to photograph, perform inside and move through.

But I always watched a set with a director’s mind.

I would see how performance could help the camera, how camera placement could help Production Design, how a schedule or budget decision could change an actor’s emotional energy. Sometimes all the individual departments were doing strong work, but the film still needed somebody to coordinate their rhythms organically.

That made something very clear to me: the overall breath of a story matters.

I don’t mean that a director should control everybody. In fact, collaboration is the opposite of that. I mean somebody has to understand when one element should step forward and when another should disappear. A film has to become a living organism rather than an assembly of technically correct pieces.

As I became more comfortable in the United States and more confident personally, I felt myself returning to the intention I had before Production Design: directing was always where I wanted to go.

You describe yourself specifically as a Director and Director of Photography. When do those two roles need to be combined?

I don’t believe there is a formula.

Sometimes the most intelligent directorial decision is to give the photography completely to another Director of Photography. Sometimes you collaborate very closely with a Director of Photography but use another camera operator. Sometimes the immediacy of the film requires something much looser.

For So Far and From Now On, I wrote the screenplay and understood the protagonist’s internal rhythm very specifically. I knew why she turned her head at a certain moment, why she walked faster in another, why a breath or hesitation mattered. In that case, I felt that putting the camera physically in my own hands could help connect the photographic movement directly to her psychological movement.

Photography is something I’m extremely sensitive to. A lens is not simply a focal length to me. The way an older lens renders green, skin, flare or the transition into the out‑of‑focus area can completely change the emotional weight of an image. The same location photographed with two different camera‑and‑lens combinations can suddenly feel like two different memories.

But that doesn’t mean I need to photograph everything I direct. The question is always: what arrangement gives this particular story the most life?

And the reverse is true when I work as Director of Photography for someone else. Then my job is not to impose my authorship. My job is to understand somebody else’s creative language deeply enough that my technical and visual knowledge helps that director express it more completely.

You use the term “hyper‑realism” to describe your filmmaking. What does that mean to you?

I first encountered the term through visual art when I was younger, particularly extremely detailed representational drawing and painting. Later, during a World Cinema course in the United States, I used “hyper‑realism” in a manifesto about the kind of filmmaking I wanted to pursue.

For me, ordinary realism is not quite enough.

Most of our lives look uneventful from the outside. We repeat routines. We go to work. We talk to somebody for three minutes. We borrow a lighter. We sit in a car. But psychologically, thousands of small things are happening and disappearing all the time.

A very small interaction can create an enormous interior movement that nobody else sees, and sometimes we ourselves forget it five minutes later.

Hyper‑realism, for me, means using the structure of narrative filmmaking to enlarge those almost invisible experiences without making them false.

In Production Design that might mean a character from a wealthy but emotionally absent household doesn’t simply have “messy clothes.” I would want to know what two hundred pieces of clothing this particular person might actually own, how they accumulate, what texture they create in the room and what that tells us unconsciously.

With a camera, the same principle can apply to breathing, balance, distance or movement.

The goal is not spectacle. It is to make the audience suddenly recognize a tiny human experience that they may have lived themselves but never thought was important enough to acknowledge.

Which filmmakers helped you understand that kind of cinema?

Three people have stayed especially important to me for different reasons.

John Cassavetes showed me the value of building an artistic system that is complete enough to resist convention when convention no longer serves the people in the film. I don’t want my work to be extreme simply for the sake of being extreme, but I admire the completeness of his commitment.

Sean Baker reminds me that cinema is a physical practice. There is something very moving to me about a filmmaker who understands so many aspects of production and still approaches filmmaking with speed, instinct, curiosity and love. His phrase “long live independent filmmaking” means a great deal to me because independence is not only a budget category. It is a relationship to the act of making.

And David Lynch represents another kind of integrity. His work reminds me that authorship has to begin with something genuinely personal. The expression may be strange to somebody else, but the creator cannot fake his own relationship with it.

Those three are very different filmmakers, but what connects them for me is commitment.

You grew up in China and later built your filmmaking life in Los Angeles. Has that distance changed the way you observe American life?

Absolutely, although I try not to turn that into a judgment about which society is better.

Living between cultures makes you notice behaviors that might otherwise become invisible.

One thing I became sensitive to in Los Angeles is how much pressure people can feel to package ordinary life positively—to describe experiences as amazing, incredible, perfect, productive. There are many positive things about that energy. It can encourage ambition and invention.

But I sometimes think there is also a kind of psychological inflation. If everything has to sound extraordinary, it can become difficult to admit fear, disappointment, confusion or simply ordinariness.

Those quieter states interest me because they are still deeply human.

Every society creates different forms of loneliness and different emotions that become difficult to speak about. Being an outsider in America sometimes allows me to notice those spaces between what somebody says and what they may actually be experiencing.

That distance became very important to So Far and From Now On.

A phrase that comes up when you talk about your work is “bringing people back to being human.” What do you mean by that?

I don’t mean it as a slogan.

Technology has changed human life for a very long time, and I’m not against technology at all. I use new tools myself, including AI tools in visual development.

What feels different now is the speed and density of information. The rate at which people have to adapt is itself accelerating.

When information becomes endless and instantly available, it becomes easier to stop spending time inside your own thoughts. My concern is not that machines suddenly become evil. My concern is that human attention becomes too fragmented to recognize its own emotional life.

For me, cinema can create a protected amount of time.

You sit with another person’s face. You watch a hesitation. You experience silence before somebody answers. You temporarily accept another person’s rhythm instead of forcing everything to move at your own speed.

That is what I mean by bringing people back to being human. I want technology to remain an extraordinary tool for life, while art continues reminding us what the tool is supposed to serve.

Your work has moved through animation, storyboarding, Production Design, directing and photography. Do you see that as being a multi‑hyphenate filmmaker?

Maybe technically, but I don’t experience it that way.

To me, they are different floors of the same building.

Drawing taught me composition. Animation taught me movement and time. Storyboarding taught me to translate thought into sequential images. Production Design taught me space, texture, logistics and collaboration. Photography taught me light and physical proximity to performance. Directing asks me to put all of those things together while also understanding people.

I don’t want to know a little bit about many things simply so I can list more skills. I want each discipline to deepen the others.

That is why becoming a Director and Director of Photography feels less like changing professions and more like arriving at a place I had been constructing for a long time.

What are you working toward next?

I’m writing my next feature.

I don’t want to say too much about it yet, but it has something to do with the collision between what now feels like an older world’s common sense—even though that “old world” may only be ten years ago—and a social reality that feels almost completely unfamiliar while already sitting directly in front of us.

Over the next several years I want to keep making films about ordinary people, realism, and the relationship between private life and rapid social change.

There will always be new tools and new forms.

What I hope stays consistent is the reason to use them.