I’m Bryan Yanbing Lee, a 22-year-old Malaysian-American filmmaker based in New York City.

Ever since I was really young, I’ve loved storytelling, but more than storytelling I’ve loved satire, parody and comedy, particularly dark comedy. My parents didn’t allow me to play a lot of video games when I was growing up so I had to entertain myself through Mad magazines and books. Soon I started drawing comics, and I started selling them to my next door neighbor for a quarter per issue by the time I was around ten years old. This wasn’t financially prosperous for me, but despite this I’ve always loved film, and comics were my gateway into film especially since comics can be seen as a sort of storyboard. It was also through reading comics that I inevitably stumbled upon Alan Moore, and his works, such as Watchmen, and it blew me away. I started falling in love with the way he deconstructed genre tropes, such as superheroes, and even classic monsters, such as the Invisible Man, and I realized very quickly that this is the kind of story that I want to tell. As I grew older, I started participating in film programs at the age of fourteen, and I made a bunch of short films heavily inspired by this desire to tell darkly comedic and genre-subversive stories, and I even got one of them into the All-American High School Film Festival, which was a huge confidence booster when I was a teenager.

When I landed in New York from Asia at the age of 19, I continued trying to work on films that capture the genre-subversive tendencies that I have. One project I made, Love Locked, was about Cupid missing his arrow and injuring someone instead of making them fall in love, and the other was Empathy Man, which was my attempt to tell a story about grief through the lens of the superhero genre. Both did pretty well at festivals, each landing a semi-finalist at the Rhode Island Flicker’s Film Festival, as well as other distinctions and awards at other festivals, which was extremely encouraging for me as a young filmmaker.

Currently wrapping up the post-production process of my latest short film and NYU thesis project, “THE AMERICAN,” I’m excited to re-enter the festival circuit this year and continue my pursuits as a writer/director.