In Bob, the titular character (played by Jayson Xiao), a Chinese boy adjusting to life in the United States, feels abandoned by his mother when she enrolls him in boarding school. Photos courtesy of Tianyu Du (COM’24)

Arts & Culture

COM Student Wins Directors Guild of America Student Award

Bob, directed by Tianyu Du (COM’24), is a coming-of-age story of a Chinese boy navigating life in America

A short film by College of Communication student Tianyu Du has won a coveted 2023 Directors Guild of America Student Award. Du’s film Bob was awarded first place in the Best Asian American Student Filmmaker for the East Region category. The top prize came with $2,500 and was awarded at a ceremony held in December in New York City.

Bob is the story of a Chinese boy and his family who have recently arrived in the United States. With little money and a shaky home environment, Bob’s mother decides to enroll him in a boarding school, with the hope of giving him a better future. But the boy feels he has been abandoned and resists being away from his mother in an unknown country. 

“The intent of making this film is to bring people’s awareness to how younger people feel about immigrating, and let the parents think or rethink: is this the best way for [their children] to grow up?’” says Du (COM’24). 

Du, who wrote and directed the film, says Bob is just the second script she’s written in English and the first she’s edited. She earned an undergraduate degree at the Beijing Film Academy, where she wrote and directed two short films and penned two feature-length scripts, one that went on to win a Best Creative Student Script Award from Disney+ in China. As a US transplant, however, she felt her confidence flagging.

“During the first several months I was in Boston, I was totally alone and pretty much homeless, too,” she says. “You have no idea how difficult things can be when you’re just alone in a completely new country, with no friends and relatives. You have to work really hard to keep up with the classes, and on the other side, you need to figure out how to find a decent house to live in and begin your life there.” 

Du kept asking herself whether she was the only person who had ever encountered these challenges. “I realized that the answer is definitely no, you’re not alone,” she says. 

She began to read news stories about other people who had migrated to another country, and that inspired her to write the script for Bob, which went on to win COM’s Adrienne Shelly Foundation Script-to-Film Award $5,000 production grant at last year’s Redstone Film Festival. 

“This little boy, this figure just came into my mind,” Du says. “I just wanted to tell a story about somebody who’s in the same kind of situation. Bob is representative of me…but also of thousands of people.” 

Du created and developed Bob in the COM class Social Purpose Shorts, cotaught by Gustavo Rosa and Marni Zelnick, both assistant professors of film and television. Classmates Jessica Yijie Chen (COM’23), Raphael Edwards (CAS’23, COM’23, Sargent’23), Rafeeat Bishi (COM’24), and Emily Ma (CAS’23, COM’23) also helped on the film.

“The great thing about an award like this is it shows you what you can do,” Zelnick says. “We had targeted and very specifically encouraged this film to apply for an award, because we felt it was such a good fit and it’s such a wonderful project,”

“With Bob, the stars aligned,” Rosa adds. “The crew was fantastic, the script was great, the casting was great. And so it was a really magical film, the way it came together.”

Ma, who was the film’s production designer, says she was drawn to the project because of her own experience. “I’m originally from Hong Kong, but I left home when I was 15 to come to the United States for high school, and then I stayed,” she says, adding that the film offers a unique perspective “on life that we don’t really talk about.” 

As the child of immigrant parents from Nigeria, Bishi, the film’s assistant director, also felt a kinship with Bob. “A lot of the little mannerisms and experiences that were depicted in the script were really parallel to a lot of things that I understood growing up being first-gen in America,” Bishi says.

Du says winning the award is an “amazing opportunity,” especially considering she is still fairly new to this country. “It’s really unbelievable,” she says. “I’m honored. Our team, and the story, really deserved an award.” 

She is especially appreciative of her professors, who have given her both instruction and support. “As a female director, sometimes you just feel like you’re not strong enough to really make a film, but they somehow bring [out] the best of me.” 

Like Du, Bishi, and Ma, other members of Bob’s production team were either immigrants or part of first-generation families. Bob, Du says, is for them.

“This film is something like a warm, warm hug for all those who immigrated here,” she says. “Here, whether you are a success or not, when you take your first step into another country, you’re already brave enough. And that’s the reason I made this film.”