Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Yen.
Hi Chris, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I started making films when I was six years old in San Jose, long before I understood that it could become a career. My parents came to America as Vietnamese refugees and rebuilt their lives from nothing. My mother became a software engineer, while my father’s path ran through gambling and the street economy. I grew up between two worlds: structure and survival, immigrant sacrifice and Bay Area hustle. That contradiction became the foundation of my voice as an artist.
Before I had a crew, I taught myself every part of filmmaking. I wrote, acted, shot, edited, and scored videos for YouTube, eventually reaching more than a million views. I also studied jazz piano for around 15 years, which shaped how I understand rhythm, performance, and editing. I later attended film school, but I dropped out after realizing my greatest education came from attempting projects that seemed impossible with the resources I had.
The project that defined me was Suburban Story, a crime drama I made for roughly $7,000 with a small group of friends, most of whom had no previous film experience. I trained the crew myself and designed everything from the cinematography and production design to practical car crashes, gunshots, and blood effects. The film took years to complete, but it ultimately won 15 awards and proved that cinematic scale does not begin with money. It begins with vision, preparation, and the willingness to master the process.
Today, I’m developing my first feature, Fish, Prawn, Crab, through Nagrooven Pictures. It follows a Vietnamese American hustler who transforms a traditional family dice game into an underground Oakland gambling empire to give his little sister a future. At one point, I was offered $1 million to make the film on the condition that I change its identity from Vietnamese to Chinese. I declined.
Now I’m building the film independently as its writer, director, lead actor, editor, and composer. My goal is bigger than making one movie. I want to prove that Vietnamese America and the multicultural, working-class communities of the Bay can stand at the center of an American crime epic without diluting who we are. Everything I have built comes from the same belief: art is power, and sometimes your limitations become the reason your voice exists at all.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has not been a smooth road at all. Most of my career has been an attempt to create at a level my resources were never supposed to allow. I did not come from money or industry connections, so when I could not afford an experienced crew, expensive equipment, or large-scale effects, I had to learn how to build those capabilities myself.
Suburban Story became the greatest test of that mentality. Most of my crew were friends with no previous film experience, so I trained them while simultaneously writing, directing, acting, shooting, editing, designing, and financing the film. There were long periods when progress was nearly invisible to everyone except us. The hardest part was not any individual technical challenge. It was maintaining belief long enough for the work to finally catch up with the vision.
Money has remained one of the largest obstacles. Every ambitious idea forces me to reverse-engineer a method that can achieve the same emotional impact with fewer resources. That pressure led me to design practical car crashes, gunshots, blood effects, camera systems, and production workflows from the ground up. It required years of unpaid labor and an uncomfortable amount of responsibility, but those limitations ultimately became the foundation of my filmmaking style.
With Fish, Prawn, Crab, the struggle has evolved. I am no longer just trying to finish a film. I am building one that can survive contracts, insurance, safety requirements, legal review, and distribution without sacrificing its identity. I have had opportunities that promised a faster road, including a million-dollar offer that required changing the story from Vietnamese to Chinese. Walking away was difficult, but reaching the destination with the wrong film would have been a greater failure.
The road has been slow, uncertain, and expensive, but it has also made my voice impossible to separate from the work. Every obstacle has forced me to become more resourceful, more disciplined, and more certain about why I am doing this.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a writer, director, actor, editor, composer, and recording artist, and I lead Nagrooven Pictures in the Bay Area. I specialize in culturally specific crime dramas that combine the intimacy of a family story with the scale and momentum of an epic. My work centers Vietnamese America and the multicultural, working-class communities of the Bay, not as background or representation added to an existing formula, but as the source of the story’s language, rhythm, humor, conflict, and worldview.
Vietnamese American stories have often been viewed primarily through war, displacement, trauma, or assimilation. Those stories are important, but they cannot be the only lens through which we are seen. I want Vietnamese American characters to inherit the full range of American cinema. I want us to be complicated, ambitious, funny, dangerous, flawed, powerful, and iconic. My goal is to move us from the margins of other people’s stories into the authorship of our own mythology.
I am best known for my award-winning short film Suburban Story, which was created for roughly $7,000 and went on to win 15 awards. With a small, self-trained crew, we built practical car crashes, gunshots, blood effects, and elaborate camera movements that appeared far beyond the scale of our budget. That film became proof of my ability to reverse-engineer ambitious ideas and invent an original method when the conventional one is out of reach.
What sets me apart is not simply the number of roles I perform, but the way those disciplines communicate. While I am writing, I can already hear the score and see the edit. While directing, I shape the performances, camera movement, production design, and music around the same rhythm. When I enter post-production, I am completing decisions that began on the page rather than reinventing the film. Each stage strengthens one connected vision.
That same approach extends into my music as CHRI$ ¥EN. I do not see the soundtrack, live experiences, merchandise, or visual identity as separate promotional pieces. They are all expressions of the same story world. My goal is to create cultural events around the films, allowing Vietnamese and Bay Area culture to influence not only what audiences watch, but also what they hear, wear, share, and experience together.
I am most proud that I turned a group of friends who had never worked on a film into a team capable of creating an award-winning one. It taught me that leadership is not about waiting for perfect conditions. It is about helping people see the same picture, then building the system that allows them to achieve it together. That impact matters to me beyond the screen because changing the industry also means expanding who believes they belong behind the camera.
I am now applying everything I learned to my first feature, Fish, Prawn, Crab. The film transforms Bầu Cua, a traditional Vietnamese family game, into the foundation of an Oakland crime epic. At its core, my work is about transforming cultural specificity into cinematic scale.
I want to change the industry by proving that cultural authenticity and commercial ambition are not opposites. I am building a creator-led model in which communities do not have to wait for an established system to validate their stories or dilute their identity to reach a wider audience. I want the next Vietnamese American kid with an impossible idea to inherit more possibility than I did and understand that our culture is not a limitation on how far a story can travel. It is the reason the story can exist at all.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
Growing up, I was imaginative, obsessive, independent, and extremely ambitious. I rarely liked anything casually. Once something captured my attention, I wanted to understand every part of it and become great at it. I was not always the loudest person in the room, but I had a strong internal conviction about what I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time observing people, imagining different worlds, and turning whatever I saw around me into stories.
Filmmaking became my first real obsession when I was six. I loved that it allowed me to combine everything: writing, acting, music, visuals, technology, and leadership. Before I understood what a director actually did, I was already trying to create entire worlds and convince other people to step inside them. I could spend hours shooting and editing something simply because I needed to see whether the idea in my head could become real.
Music was equally important. I studied jazz piano for around 15 years, which gave me discipline but also taught me how to improvise. Film taught me how to think in images, while music taught me how to think in rhythm and emotion. Eventually, those interests became inseparable.
Being raised by Vietnamese refugee parents also gave me a strong awareness that my opportunities were built from someone else’s sacrifice. That created an urgency in me. I felt that if I had been given the freedom to dream, I had a responsibility to do something meaningful with it.
As I have grown, I have learned that leadership is not expecting people to read your mind. It is learning how to communicate a vision so clearly that other people can see themselves inside it.
In many ways, I am still the same kid I was: endlessly curious, a little crazy, and determined to make something exist simply because I can already see it.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nagrooven
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nagrooven
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Nagrooven
