SPECIAL PRESENTATION
TIGER MOM Academy
Directed by Shawn Shao-Wen Chou
Narrative | 96 Minutes | English, Mandarin and Chinese with English Subtitles
- Saturday, Nov. 14, 6:30PM EST
- Emerson Paramount Center
- 559 Washington St. Boston, MA
Followed by an in-person Q&A with Shawn Shao-Wen Chou (Co-Producer, Writer, Director, Editor) & Michelle Krusiec (Co-Producer, Writer, Actor)
Marilyn Khu’s life is a wreck.
Her kids are both neighborhood screw-ups and school outcasts. Her husband Jimmy is even worse, an out-of-touch man-child, stuck in his VR headset and oblivious to his wife’s downward spiral. Matters worsen when their kids get expelled from school.
Hitting rock bottom, she salvages her children’s future and her own dignity by enrolling them in a private boarding school, run by education guru and strict disciplinarian Suki Lai. Unlike other boarding schools, Tiger Academy doesn’t just teach children, it also teaches mothers. Its methods are unorthodox, but it gets Ivy League results. And if you fail, there are consequences.
As Marilyn becomes increasingly indoctrinated by Suki, her kids are whipped into the best academic performance of their lives…but there’s a cost and even hidden secrets. What is Marilyn willing to sacrifice for her kids to be the perfect children? Is it her soul? Just when Jimmy finally matures without Marilyn to see to his every needs, Marilyn discovers Suki’s ulterior motives and she calls Jimmy to action.
Shawn Shao-Wen Chou (Co-Producer, Writer, Director, Editor)
A member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the Motion Picture
Editor’s Guild Local 700 with over twenty years of experience as a Director, Writer,Producer, and Editor. He got his start on Pool Hall Junkies starring Academy-Award
winners Christopher Walken and Rod Steiger, Enough with Jennifer Lopez, and the
Sweetest Thing with Cameron Diaz. His TV credits include The Kardashians, America’s Next Top Model, Beauty and the Geek, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Tough Love, Flavor of Love, The Biggest Loser, etc. He is obsessed with films and loves playing baseball.
Michelle Krusiec (Co-Producer, Writer, Actor)
Michelle Krusiec is an award-winning actor, writer, and director whose work blends genre, myth, and folklore to explore sharp, subversively funny female archetypes.
As a writer-director, Michelle is part of the Warner Bros. Discovery Episodic Directing Program, an alumna of the prestigious AFI Directing Workshop for Women, and holds an MFA from LMU’s Writing and Producing for Television. Her acclaimed Hulu horror short NIAN
won Best Midnight Short at the Palm Springs International ShortFest. Her feature Dormant was selected for the Chad and Carey Hayes Horror Workshop, and her short How I Learned to Fly was a semifinalist in Cate Blanchett’s Proof of Concept Accelerator.
An accomplished actor, Michelle is the only Asian American nominated for a Best Actress Golden Horse Award—the Chinese-language Oscar—for her leading role in Saving Face opposite Joan Chen. Her notable screen credits include playing Hollywood icon Anna May Wong in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Hollywood and starring in Far North alongside Michelle
Yeoh. On stage, she starred in Wild Goose Dreams at The Public Theater, King of Hell’s Palace at the Goodman Theatre, the international Broadway tour of Chinglish, and earned a Best Actress nomination for The Chinese Lady at the Chance Theater.
A fierce advocate for AAPI visibility, her advocacy and artistic contributions have been honored by the White House, the California State Assembly, and the Museum of Chinese in America. She was also named a CAAM Screenwriting Fellow.