Chen Feng (30), a Chinese writer and director, is making a low-budget fiction film across America.

A few years ago, Feng's mother, Chen Yan, died suddenly from a mysterious fall. During her mourning, Feng cleaned out her mother’s home and discovered a photobook buried deep in a closet — a series featuring wild and weird Americans taken during candid moments. All are dated from the early to mid-80’s during the time Yan lived in America, before Feng was born.

These photos felt alive with Yan’s loose spirit. Feng feverishly wrote a series of short, fictitious scripts about the people from the photos — visualizations of the dream world that her mother’s photos provoked in her — and came up with a relay-film that bounces the various characters in stories from one chapter to the next.

Her script starts with the final picture in the book, a singer on stage, taken at a nightclub in the Mississippi Delta in 1985. The caption underneath reads: “The wild and charming Bluesman Bobby Rush.” This photo would be the first in a series of 8 short stories she’d write which are full of comedic horrors, never quite reaching conclusions. She titled the screenplay Automatic Everything.

In her application for an American-Chinese development grant, she wrote that "the stories are true to and far from reality, particular and general, humorous and sad, everyone separate but together in a collective search for belonging.” She won the grant, which awarded her a living stipend and host-home in America and funds to begin production on her film.