I don't see clearly. Not beneath the surface, not far enough.

This is why I write, why I've become a filmmaker. An act on my part to explore, to understand, to know. It's a thirst I have yet to quench. The American poet Elizabeth Bishop once wrote of her need to drink: "I have suffered from abnormal thirst – I swear it's true – and by the age of twenty or twenty-one I had begun to drink, & drink – I can't get enough."

I began to drink like Bishop when at age twenty I made my first film. I pointed the camera at myself but when I saw the image, I didn't know who was staring back. I started writing. About a Vietnamese-American teenager who discovered his father was a former Viet Cong. I stepped into his skin, and ended up climbing into my own. Suddenly, a layer of soot came off and I saw more clearly: my own complex inner life lay naked in front of me.

In 2002, I graduated from MIT and entered the graduate film program at Columbia University. I wrote and directed my first narrative film called Game Boy, which explored a videogame designer's quest for the ideal man. I wrote and directed another, The Zero Hour, about a college student discovering his homosexuality in the midst of a threesome. I adapted and directed The Moon Please, which investigated a couple's marriage-in-crisis as they waited for their babysitter to arrive on the morning of September 11th. I made these films to see into the lives of others, as well as my own.

My goal as a writer and director has been to ask questions. How do we become? What relationships do we build with others? Where's the self located? Our soul? How do we find beauty and truth within the confines of our own experience? In what way does our sexual or racial identity define who we are? When can we be freed?

I was watching a documentary recently on that iconic photo of the young Chinese man who stood in front of a row of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. While the image is readily available to the rest of the world, the Chinese government has repressed the image from circulation within its country. As a result, Chinese teenagers have never seen that image, and are not even aware of their own recent history. This is what I try to fight against as an artist. Loss of culture, loss of memory. Loss of the truth. Blindness.

The task in front of me is huge. As a storyteller, I aspire to continue the tradition of the greats: Ford, Cassavetes, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa. I seek to capture in my work what Carl Theodor Dreyer calls the "motions of the soul."

I have just started. I am still learning to see.