Q&A WITH HANNAH COLEN: THE SUN IS FINALLY OUT

by Victoria Sterling

Caption: BTS with cast and crew of TSIFO

Photographer and filmmaker Hannah Colen, 25, discusses her career, artistic process, and production of the short film, The Sun Is Finally Out, to be released this year. Her photography practice of capturing vignettes and documentary take to filmmaking to depict joyous queer Asian love on screen.

The teaser was screened as part of the group exhibition OAT MILK + HXNY at the Brewhouse Works in Pittsburgh, PA and can also be currently viewed on YouTube.

Victoria:  I’m sitting today with Hannah Colen to talk about her artistic career and the film, The Sun Is Finally Out. How are you doing today? 

Hannah:  I am doing so wonderful, especially now that I’m here with you.

Thank you. What are you currently up to in Pittsburgh these days?

Oh, man, I am mentally preparing a list. I’m continuing photography, freelance-wise, so my typical portraits. I do events. I’ve been doing a lot of art documentation and art photography these days, which has been a fun path to explore down. I am continuing marketing for mix of clients, some education settings, some in nonprofits, and then a few others in the arts business world. 

Outside of that, I am focusing on healing. I feel like this past year, I’m sure, for many people, has been pretty intense in many ways. I think for me, the past three months have been a great big exhale, and now my body is sort of resetting. I feel like my nervous system is kind of coming back to where it should be. Just continuing bringing that into 2025, and starting the year off with a little reset. [Healing] should be a full time job, honestly.

I wish. So, you are primarily a photographer who does portraits and more documentary?

Yes.

I see you have a camera on the table. What do you have with you today?

This is my sort of daily on-the-go baby from the Fuji film series. 

The film teaser of The Sun Is Finally Out played at Brew House Works in the South Side as a part of Oat Milk and Honey, an exhibition co-curated by Tacumba Turner and Venice Pascual. Can you tell me a bit about the film?

So, this is a short film I’m really excited to share in the upcoming months. It’s called, The Sun Is Finally Out. I was the director and executive producer for this film, and it surrounds a series of short vignettes focused on queer Asian love in varying forms.

It’s kind of showcasing celebration of identity, celebration of joy, and just what it means to be queer and Asian, and remove, I guess, pre-existing narratives when it comes to those communities. 

Pre-production kind of started in my mind years ago. I started in June of 2024 and finished mid-July. I’m aiming for late March, early April 2025  for the release. 

Caption: Hannah Colen, BTS at Lotus Foods

How many actors are involved?

We have ten actors, and then a crew with six people. 

So it’s the cast is ten people, and it’s five queer couples?

Everyone in the film, both cast-wise and crew, is queer and/or Asian. I didn’t also want to depict every single love as, like, fully romantic. Platonic love is just as crucial and important. 

It kind of spiraled a lot bigger than I anticipated it was originally going to be… I started with one couple, and I thought, I want to depict a variety of what love can look like in different forms. I think with my photography what I like about it is I see it as little vignettes, like snippets, and then you kind of fill in the story with your own imagination. It kind of is taking my photography into video, if that makes sense.

That does make sense, and you said, “exploring various forms of love.” Can you tell us a bit more about the love that’s depicted through these vignettes?

I think one thing that was really important for me with this project… I don’t know how your experience with like queerness and media was growing up, but at least for myself, I’ve rarely witnessed happy, queer love stories. And I think being Asian adds a  whole other layer culturally.  I grew up just so used to the stories of trauma, being disowned, feelings of being so uncomfortable in your body, and then maybe there’s love, and then it always ends in a not-so-happy place. 

I was like, wow. I mean, a lot of those hold such real and heavy truths that I think most of us, unfortunately, do experience. But, I was like, I just really want to see something that isn’t going to leave me walking away feeling kind of sad and reflecting upon my own hardships with my queer experience. So yeah, I was like, I just really want to focus on celebration, firstly, and joy, and kind of put the trauma and sad story narrative in the absolute background.

So, celebration and joy of queer love, specifically being Asian, and having the typical trauma pushed to the background. It’s not invalidated, it’s just often taking the forefront, so to have joy be centered in queer Asian love stories.

I didn’t see it being a possibility growing up like watching, like Saving Face or Happy Together. I was like, to experience a love like this, surely, it’s normalized to experience that pain. And I was like, I don’t want to think like that anymore, and I don’t think it should be normalized.

Is this to be a full feature film? 

It’s gonna be a short film not much longer than the teaser. To be honest, it’s probably gonna be around like five, six minutes.

It’s a short film, but a long photograph.

Exactly! I love that… I’m gonna steal that. 

Please do. And I know it features life at home and life at a party. If I have this right, It was filmed at a Jellyfish this summer at Certain Death, is that right?

Yes, yes, we got a good mix of settings. That was really important to me when I was sort of laying it all. I was like, I want a variety because I don’t like seeing myself and others in such monolithic portrayals.

There’s so many different people, and to even just show a glimpse of five different couples, I thought, let’s just show them in different settings, doing different things that I think about my own life and [what] my friends really like to do. Just bits of daily life, you know?

And is it specifically Pittsburgh, or is it anonymized city life?

That’s kind of one thing I wanted to showcase, but not make it like the forefront. I did want it set in Pittsburgh and with that in mind. And Jellyfish, that was actually my starting point because I look up to Steph [Tsong] so much. I think she is such a leader – a pioneer, honestly – in this community. And I know all the queer folks are at Jellyfish. We have to, we just have to. 

It’s the epicenter of multitudes of queer love.

Literally, literally! I was like, oh my god, what a dream it would be. It’s like… and Certain Death, it’s just such a fun venue. I was like, what a wonderful opportunity. Like, I need to take advantage of this. 

Although we don’t necessarily show street names or identifying areas, the houses are very clearly Pittsburgh, like, you get that sort of energy from it. And I think also what you mentioned with you seeing so many familiar faces, I think that’s a big part of it, too. One thing I noticed with, I guess, the pre-production was I didn’t realize how many people knew each other. And everyone had honestly DM’ed me individually, or they had seen it, you know, on a casting website. Actually I only got, I think, two people on a casting website,

Because it was primarily cast through an open call on your Instagram?

Exactly, Instagram was the main one, but it wasn’t even like, “Oh, hey, my friends…” People were reaching out. 

And then I realized they all knew each other, and I was like, this is insane. This is actually amazing. I I think that’s what I love is it’s authentic. It’s not like, I’m just bringing random people who are pretending to be, you know, queer on camera and pretending to just like, “Oh, we’re all friends already.” 

TSIFO crew BTS in a home in Polish Hill, Pittsburgh

So the cast is ten individuals who ended up mostly knowing each other, who are queer and Asian, and they are anything from a Reiki Master to a DJ to medical students. I was actually thinking, it’s funny that we had met originally in 2021ish, at Jellyfish, which…

We did! Oh oh, my gosh, we did!

Brings it all full circle. But you had moved to Washington, DC, right? Because you had an internship at the Smithsonian?

I interned during college, so I sort of gained connections in DC then, and started slowly planting baby roots down there. And then I kept coming back every single summer after.

Yes!

I lucked out right after college and got a job, and so I was working in media production in DC, and that’s where I got some hands-on experience with video stuff. But it was more so of a corporate client setting so I couldn’t really use my creative juices all that much. 

But for a first job after school that sounds like a spectacular opportunity.

A dream. It was such a dream. So yeah, learned a lot there, and…

Yes. This is amazing. What is your involvement like with the film? 

Hmm, so this, I got this opportunity, and I wouldn’t have honestly started [this film] without joining the Warhol Academy Filmmaking and Post Production Fellowship.

How does this experience inform your future projects?

I think once I hit the post-production aspect, I started getting really overwhelmed. Did I take too big of a bite for my first filmmaking project?

Others in the fellowship, I guess, weren’t necessarily involving this many people, and having multiple, multiple days of shooting. And with multiple, jobs on top of that, I think I did too much. But with this, it really encouraged me that t’s more than okay to step out of your comfort zone and try new things. For me, this was a really great taste of what it feels like to be more of a director in a film role.

What brought you back to Pittsburgh that landed you ultimately at the Warhol?

Oh, my goodness… it’s a long story. I stayed in DC probably a year and a half, and I think I just at the time, I had some personal things happen, and I just needed a fresh start. Love DC. Still love DC. I go back for work quite a bit, but, yeah, I was like, I just need a change of scenery. 

I felt very stifled there. With my partner at the time, we went on a six month road trip across the US. Literally, he was working remote, so he had flexibility, and he was nice enough to go with my crazy idea. We would wake up at 6am, do work on the West Coast, but I was working fully freelance. I quit what I was doing. I kind of closed chapters there and just traveled for six months. And after, we considered moving back to DC, but then we ultimately thought to clean the slate a bit. He knew I grew up in the area, and I really, really missed my community here. My  heart just immediately led back here, and I think it was the right decision because it’s been really good being back.

This is amazing. 

I realized that in my work, I love people. I want to continue focusing my work on individuals and their stories. 

So the goal is to continue exploring stories of people and now having different media tools at your disposal? 

Exactly, exactly. I don’t know if you mentioned my Tender photo series before. It was a series focused on people’s vulnerabilities, oftentimes in physical ways. And it was an ongoing photo series where I basically would come to people’s homes and they would allow me to photograph them in whatever state they felt most comfortable in, and that was my first time being in people’s personal spaces and seeing them in, you know, very vulnerable states, sometimes nude. This kind of reaffirmed that… as much as you’re enjoying all these other forms of work…it all kind of circles back to just connecting with people and feeling very grateful for what they share with me, and feeling even more grateful to share that with others as well. 

Yeah, that’s really beautiful. I keep wanting to make a joke about holding space.

I have many holistic, holistically centered friends. I feel like their lingo is seeped into it in the best way possible.

What is the key audience you’d like to reach?

Ultimately, I think it’s a love letter to my queer Asian community, but I hope it’s enjoyed by everyone, every season. I’ve gotten a good response so far, and I feel really blessed, and also a lot more pressure to do really well with officially making it beautiful for the world.

Do you have any advice for femme Asian artists today?

I think just keep connecting with others that have similar stories, that understand you, because it’s so easy to share those stories with others that don’t necessarily understand your background, and then that leads to feeling invalidated oftentimes, where it’s not received in the way that it should be. 

I would just say, try to find those who can – I was trying to say – hold space. 

Try to find those who can hold space for you. 

I gotta go. — laughing

Do you have anything else you would like me to ask you before we wrap up? 

I’m just gonna talk about coming out real quick. I’m not out to my family officially. I’m the sort of person that I’m very okay talking about being queer, but I’m not going to go out and publicly, I guess, announce it. It’s just subtly there and present, if that makes sense. It’s woven into my life and what I do, but it’s not very blatantly out there. 

In a way, this [film] was kind of me, I don’t know, coming out. I don’t think I’ve shared a lot of queer work in the past. 

Initially, I was thinking of not even sharing TSIFO anywhere, and keeping it with just the crew and cast and whoever was with the original program. I didn’t know if I even wanted to share it because I was worried about  about what it says about me. But then I was like… oh my goodness, this again. This is just me falling back into what I’m hoping to leave or kind of remove myself from. So I need to just lean into feeling scared for a minute. 

But, yeah, at this point in my life, I think: It is what it is. Take it or leave it, enjoy it or don’t enjoy.

Is there anything unexpected that came from this that challenges you personally or you as an artist?

I think this was the first time, at moments I didn’t feel like an artist, and I didn’t feel qualified enough to consider myself a filmmaker, let alone a director or producer. I felt really, really heavy imposter syndrome for the majority of this, to be completely honest. 

That’s also part of why I kind of wanted to keep it private too, because I was like, Oh, I don’t feel like it deserves to get seen. A lot of it was technical. Although I had experience in media production, I was so new to a lot of the logistics of it. 

I think having 16 people involved added another layer of, oh… man, now I need to have release forms for everything. How do I even, how do I even do that? I need to write one. I think as I went, I learned that filmmaking just comes with, if you start one thing, there’s ten other checklists that you need to do, and I just wasn’t anticipating that. I guess I knew it was a lot more work and many other layers I didn’t really consider but it’s intense. I feel grateful that I had a photography background coming into it, but I just, I have a lot more respect for filmmakers now, because I’m like, Oh, my goodness, it’s so, so many details.

That’s how I feel starting anything new.

Right.

And I think that’s why I even reached out to you. I think these are the barriers that keep a lot of people from experimenting more.

Exactly. It’s really scary, but it’s really fun.

And men do it all the time. 

One of the best pieces of advice I got this past year was just start talking and thinking like a straight white man when it comes to your work. I was like, wow, I didn’t I didn’t realize how much I shrunk myself at times, and I still catch myself doing it.

And I see filmmaking specifically being gatekept in certain ways, even as an outsider. So I thought that was really cool to see TSIFO happening, let alone in Pittsburgh. The amount of collaborative energy in Pittsburgh is a phenomenon in itself.

Oh my goodness. 

And then for you to confirm, like you picked 10 seemingly random queer people off the street, and they all already know each other. Off the streets of Instagram.

God, Pittsburgh is just such a hidden gem. Like, oh, my God, not even hidden. It’s just a gem. 

It’s hiding in plain sight.

Very much so.

Some just chose to glaze past it. Well, I think this is perfect. Let’s end here!

Thank you for having me. More to come. 

Perfect.

Gorgeous.

Victoria Sterling (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Previously the manager of the Geography of Philosophy Project at the University of Pittsburgh, Victoria is curating events and projects in the city’s local art and cultural scene.

IG: @vi_ster