Paula Hung
2025 HEAR US Awardee
Undergraduate Film & TV Class of 2025
Paula Hung is a Venezuelan-American, Queer filmmaker who deeply values authentically elevating underrepresented voices to build multifaceted and joyous stories. Combining their passions for activism and storytelling, they hope to create works that are accessible, representative, and transformative.
Project
Por La Patria
“Patria”, a Spanish term with no direct English translation, describes an embodied sense of identity, belonging, and cultural heritage not limited to a physical space, but broader ideals of freedom, unity, and social justice. In a dystopian East Harlem where loudness is criminalized and surveillance is inescapable, La Patria has grown as a grassroots organization for resistance. At a vigil for her disappeared sister, a young musician must reckon with what’s left of her family, love, and freedom when surveillance drones target their church. Told over the course of one night, the story follows Lucero, her father, and her ex-girlfriend as they find their own ways to fight for La Patria if they are to survive until sunrise.
“Por La Patria” is a sci-fi thriller short film inspired directly by real historical and contemporary experiences of oppression, positing the future that awaits if we fail to live loudly today.
I came to this film searching for an explicitly Latine angle on the science-fiction dystopia, a genre especially useful to highlight socio-political complexities but rarely permitted non-white leads. The dystopian condition of "Por La Patria" is extrapolated from Xochitl Gonzalez’s essay "Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?". Examining how BIPOC communities are policed for their loudness, Gonzalez posits that silence is both an environmental condition and an aesthetic that requires constant regulation, hostile to living (versus “residing”). But loudness can also be a weapon, as the unrelenting buzz of UAVs (zanana) ties a year of Gazan footage together. Throughout this, I’ve found the artist prevails in resistance. “Por La Patria” is the culmination of the questions that made me an artist– about art’s role in social justice, self-definition, and the question that plagues all of us: How does the artist learn to fight in a revolution?
