My guest today is award-winning Chinese-born filmmaker Michael Yuchen Lei. His fiction and non-fiction work has screened at leading festivals including Tribeca, Slamdance, San Sebastian, CPH:DOX, and Palm Springs.  Michael is a graduate of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where he began his career in music as a photographer for Joe Walsh of the Eagles, later photographing artists such as Ringo Starr, the xx, and Outkast. He produced the documentary Echo which went on to win the 2023 Audience Award at Aspen Shortsfest and premiered on The New Yorker. He is currently a 2025 Rideback RISE Fellow and an Indeed Rising Voices filmmaker. Michael’s Oscar-qualified short film MUSHROOM DAD, has been selected as part of the groundbreaking Indeed Rising Voices Season 5, the celebrated initiative from Emmy-winning writer, producer, and director Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad Productions and Ventureland, in partnership with Indeed. Ladies and gentlemen, the poignant and surreal dramedy, Mushroom Dad follows a young chef struggling to manage the most important night of his career, the opening of his restaurant, while unexpectedly caring for his Chinese-immigrant father, who accidentally consumes psychedelic mushrooms. Blending humor and heart, the film is both a playful family tale and a meditation on identity, generational divides, and the immigrant experience. Everything about this film is fantastic from the storyline, the acting, the emotion and the cinematography, but this film truly shines because the heartfelt message it brings to the audience.  When we’re young we tend to react to our parents ways of criticism. Sometimes they don’t know they are being critical as they think they are helping us along in their own way.  Maybe we need to take some psychedelic mushrooms and get the emotional clarity to see that some criticism is just love in disguise. #shortfilm #cinema #film #filmmaker #indeed #risingvoices #oscars #academyawards #family #fatherson #filmmaking #filmdirector #psychedelicmushrooms #chinese #familytradition