My name is Tania Gunadi, I was born in Java, Indonesia, and moved to Los Angeles when I won a green card lottery as a teenager. At that time, the only method to enter the lottery was via mail, and one could submit as many entries as they wanted. However, my mom wanted me to stay in Indonesia, so I could only convince her to mail in one entry. But to everyone's surprise, I was the only one in my town who had won. While I didn’t yet speak English, I knew it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

LA was love at first sight. I got a job at a fast-food restaurant where some of my first spoken English words were, “Welcome to Pizza Hut, home of the Big Foot pizza!” I messed up a LOT of customer’s orders and quickly got demoted to cleaning the bathrooms, but it didn’t matter because I was just so eager to be waking up every day in America.

I took night classes and began on my family’s chosen career path of being an accountant, like my big sister. But I could feel in my heart that there was something else I was in America to do.

One day, a friend convinced me to go along on an open casting call for a Disneyland commercial. When the casting director asked me to “sit in the chair and pretend like you’re having the time of your life,” I was instantly hooked! I ended up with my first ever acting role that required I ride a roller coaster for hours on end at Disneyland, by far the most fun place that a girl from Indonesia had ever been!

While trying to fulfill my family’s dream, I found work at a top accounting firm. But it wasn’t my dream. My Disneyland experience had left such an indelible desire within me that I enrolled in acting classes and began auditioning on the side. Over time, I left the firm and have been enjoying this fantastic industry to this day.

A few years ago, my father passed away and one night, he visited me in a dream where he shared a logline for a dog movie. It seemed so improbable but nonetheless, I found the story idea so compelling that I had to write the screenplay.

I’d read a lot of scripts but knew nothing of writing one. Yet, I could feel the same eagerness as a kid at Pizza Hut at the idea of learning how to write one. Having spent the last couple of years learning from professional writers, I finished my first screenplay, Teddy, a story about a man and his dog.

For me, being selected in prestigious film festivals would mean being a part of the very things that I’d believed ever since I first stepped foot in the United States; that in America, even an Indonesian immigrant can have the opportunity to be, or do, or have anything that she can dream about.