Turning Around Perspectives

Genre-mixing filmmaker Andrew Undi Lee has been collaborating with four Western Sydney creatives to write a feature film with Co-Curious and set to premiere at Powerhouse Parramatta in 2025.

In his internationally acclaimed short, Melon Grab (2017), the first film he made after graduating from the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) in drama directing, Andrew Undi Lee created a poetic romance between two teenage skaters on the New South Wales Central Coast. The film’s title refers to the difficult skating move of grabbing the board’s heel-side edge between the legs while airborne, and Lee’s feat was just as dexterous for a young queer Korean Australian filmmaker from Parramatta. ‘If you really have a love for cinema and storytelling, it doesn’t matter where you come from,’ says Lee, ‘so I think AFTRS was good for me in that sense; it brought me into a greater world of networks.’

The film, which lent an emotional tenderness (and neoclassical music) to this hyper-masculine genre, not only won Lee a slew of awards, but set him on an artistic trajectory that, seven years later, sees him at the helm of his own entertainment company, Turn About, creating film and TV productions in Western Sydney. ‘Turn About means to turn around 180, to go the other way, to change perspectives,’ says Lee. ‘Yeah, to be more radical and try things differently, to not follow the crowd and see what else we can do.’ 

Over the past year, as a participant of In the Room, Lee has been collaborating with four Western Sydney writers to create a feature screenplay as part of a special collaboration between Powerhouse and Co-Curious, producers of the critically lauded film anthology Here Out West (2021). Set to premiere at Powerhouse Parramatta in 2025, the new film commission envisions life in a progressive multicultural city inspired by Parramatta, amplifying a multiplicity of cultural voices that call Western Sydney home. Lee sees In the Room as an important incubator in a wider process of allowing ‘people from marginalised backgrounds to have a voice in Australia – with the opportunity to tell their stories through their perspective. I think that’s a greater question that we have to address now. And so, one film may help push this agenda along.’

Lee has already been pushing things with Night Bloomers, the Korean Australian horror anthology he created, produced and directed for SBS in 2023, also writing three of the five short episodes. From the bittersweet tale of a grandmother hankering for life back in Korea who invites a flesh-eating goblin into her kitchen, to the vampiric desire of two gay ambulance workers experiencing relationship difficulties, these are technically assured twists on genre and grounded in culture – whether it be a lovingly prepared pajeon (the green onion pancake eaten when it rains) or a lustily consumed sundae, Korean blood sausage. ‘Koreans do have a sick sense of humour,’ says Lee. ‘We have to have a good gauge on how we see reality because we have a very traumatic history, and it is a way of how we deal with it.’

While Night Bloomers is haunted by the ghosts of ancestors and civil wars past, it is viewed through the lens of Western Sydney, where the series was filmed and where identity can be as fluid as Lee’s take on genre. ‘If you can be playful with genre, mix it with other genres, I think you can mix audiences and make people appreciate the genre in a different way,’ says Lee. And turn about perspectives in the process.