Cathy Linh Che, a Core Poetry Faculty of Antioch University at Los Angeles MFA Creative Writing Program, received the Short Film Jury Award for Non-Fiction at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the United States.
The documentary We Were the Scenery was produced and written by Che and directed by Christopher Radcliff, with production and cinematography by Jess X. Snow. It was one of over eleven thousand short film submissions to Sundance.
The documentary shares the extraordinary true story of Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che, who fled Vietnam by boat in 1975. Their journey brought them to the Philippines, where they became background extras while filming Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Cathy Linh Che is the author of two poetry books: Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press), and the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney’s, and she has received awards from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Prior to joining Antioch at Core Faculty in Poetry, Cathy taught creative writing at New York University, Fordham University, the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe, and was a Distinguished Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at Sierra Nevada College.
To learn more about Che, visit her website.
