Grad Film alumni featured in Filmmaker Magazine 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2025

Grad Film alumni Chheangkea, Pepi Ginsberg, and Mariano Dongo were featured in Filmmaker Magazine's 2025 edition of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film. 

Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites, Cambodian American director Chheangkea’s heartfelt 19-minute thesis, is both a poignant coming-of-age drama and a humorously deadpan ghost story.

Born and raised in Cambodia, Chheangkea shared a home with parents, siblings, cousins and his grandmother, also named Nai, who passed away when he was seven. Chheangkea’s parents operated a backyard recording studio and oversaw the daily production of music videos to accompany each newly recorded song. “In Cambodia back then, every song had to have an accompanying music video so that it could be used for karaoke later on,” he explains. Chheangkea played roles in front of the camera while learning the craft of filmmaking: “I grew up being on these sets, seeing makeshift cranes and sitting next to editors for hours.”

Chheangkea went on to earn a bachelor’s in architecture from MIT. After graduation, believing that he was destined to be a visual storyteller, he enrolled at NYU. Skin Can Breathe, Chheangkea’s first short (made as his second-year project), follows a Cambodian American teen attracted to another male swimmer at school. When his mother picks him up after practice, she berates her shy son’s appearance, claiming girls will never date him if he doesn’t get a significant makeover. Accordingly, his debut feature, Little Phnom Penh, “spans over two ever-changing decades, from post–Khmer Rouge Phnom Penh to early 2000s California, [following] a Cambodian woman as she grapples with her identity, family and love amid profound cultural and historical upheavals.”

Stories with “hyper real emotions that are true, but where the circumstances feel elevated,” is how Pepi Ginsberg describes what attracts her. Her breakout short, 2022’s The Pass, is a perfect illustration. It’s about a young man taking a swim in a small beach town who’s confronted—while he’s in the water—by an ambiguously menacing stranger calling out to him from shore. As she previously told Filmmaker, “I’ve been bullied emotionally by people who hate themselves, I’ve let it hurt me, and I’ve also broken free of it…. This is where the heart of the story comes from.”

The Pass premiered in the 2022 Cannes Film Festival’s La Cinef program before becoming a Vimeo Staff Pick and New Yorker selection. It also attracted the interest of French production company Yukunkun Productions, which provided funding for Ginsberg’s newest short, the 2025 SXSW-premiering WassupKaylee. 

After two acclaimed shorts, Ginsberg is moving on to features. Her current script is The Mirex, winner of the 2025 Melissa Mathison Award at the HamptonsFilm Screenwriting Lab, about a grief-stricken college student who finds further trauma in the world of a live-action role-playing game.

Born in Lima, Peru, Mariano Dongo says his interest in film began by watching movies with his mother, whom he describes as “an accidental cinephile.” During this time, he would frequent Lima’s bootleg DVD shops, where he was exposed to films by Robert Downey Sr. and Jim Jarmusch. After graduating from Emerson College, he became a development intern at Darren Aronofsky’s Protozoa Pictures. “I had to read [a large historical] biography and give coverage on it. I’m unsure whether [they were] just trying to keep me busy, but there was something about reading a voluminous [account] of a big person and imagining it in film form in an office full of film posters that I really loved.”

He eventually matriculated into NYU’s MFA film program, where he studied under Alexandre Rockwell, who “really instilled in us [a desire] to follow our fascination and [the belief that] that a good film is made when everything else is messy and there’s one diamond in there. It’s not necessarily when the whole thing is shiny.” Dongo eventually produced Rockwell’s most recent feature, Lump.

Read the full list at Filmmaker Magazine.