STORYTELLING, BEAUTY IN SUFFERING + DEFYING CONVENTION WITH INDIE FILMMAKERS CHELSIE AND CORY

In 2024, rising indie film darlings Chelsie Pennello and Cory Blair launched Yumeji House Pictures in Washington, D.C.

With Chelsie at the helm, directing, and Cory taking the reins to compose original scores, while sharing scriptwriting duties, they are quietly building a powerhouse film studio. 

Their calling cards are conceiving characters with unconventional story arcs and offbeat scores that shirk boundaries in sound, composition, and structure; it’s a technical way of saying they don’t like being put into a creative box.

Their two crown jewels—Mandarins, 2023, and Cherry-Colored Funk, 2025—are short dramas that pack a punch and showcase their budding talent and range. Yumeji has proven it has the chops to produce emotional, slow-burning, dark comedies and stylish fever dreams that deliver a satisfying helping of chaos and calamity.

The studio’s name Yumeji was taken from the song “Yumeji’s Theme” in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, the first piece of art they bonded over, representing their shared interest in films that use music in demanding ways. 

The name is also an homage to their shared Asian American heritage—Chelsie is half Chinese, and Cory is half Japanese—a heritage integral to their work. Their work champions Asian actors and underrepresented demographics while highlighting the need to incorporate more diverse stories into the film industry and give Asian actors roles that enable them to transcend their cultural identity. 

Cherry-Colored Funk is the perfect vessel for this intentionality—a film written for and starring Michael Tow, a middle-aged Asian American man. “The film is as much about America, capitalism, greed, and loneliness as it is about his Asian identity,” says the duo.

In terms of their professional arcs, Chelsie and Cory see their origins as student filmmakers and their foray into shorts as their crucible—a chance to prove themselves before taking on the next, gargantuan challenge: full-length feature films.

And others are taking notice of their talent. 

Mandarins won “Best Short Drama” at the Oscar-qualifying New Hampshire Film Festival in 2023. It also played at over 18 festivals between 2023 and 2024, including Cinequest, Cucalorus, Oak Cliff Film Festival, New/Next, FilmFest DC, and District Dreamers.

This spring, Cherry-Colored Funk premieres at the Oscar-qualifying Florida Film Festival and has its west-coast premiere at the San Luis Obispo Film Festival. 

They also recently announced that Cherry-Colored Funk has been selected for the Tribeca Festival 2025 as part of the Narrative Shorts Program. It will screen in Tribeca’s Asian diaspora shorts block, Floating Roots, this June. 

Chelsie and Cory are both recipients of the 2025 DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship award. 

Chelsie and Cory sat down with BSPKE’s Andrew Williams at D.C. mainstay Chinatown Express for a special Bespoke Notes feature to discuss their origins, approach to storytelling, how young filmmakers can balance risk-taking with intentionality to produce powerful narratives, and what’s next for Yumeji House Pictures.

Bespoke Notes: Can you help us trace your paths to filmmaking? Where did they originate, and when did they converge? 

Cory Blair: I wanted to be a filmmaker at the end of high school, going into college. I entered the University of Maryland as a journalism major and immediately joined the UMD Film Club, where I directed a short for them. 

However, I was always more interested in music and started gravitating towards music composition because you can do it independently; you can sit down with a computer in your dorm room and create something that sounds relatively professional. I began doing soundtracks for other films, producing electronic music, and creating soundtracks and albums for friends. Until the last couple of years, I didn’t get paid for anything; it was a full-time hobby. 

In 2017, I was working on soundtracks for the UMD Film Club when Chelsie and I first connected on Instagram, while she was looking for a composer. 

Chelsie Pennello: In 2017, I was making my first student film at Syracuse. We went to the same high school together. We didn't know each other. He only went there for his last two years because he grew up in California. 

I grew up in Maryland my whole life. My high school in Poolesville was a magnet school with creative houses where you could specialize. I was in the arts and humanities program and had a wonderful teacher, Shannon Heaton, who taught art history and photography. She was great—young, hip, cool, and feminist. Many girls in the program took a liking to her.

She encouraged the photography aspect. At one point, I thought I wanted to be a photographer. I was interested in creating surreal photography. I was really bad, but it was a lot of fun as a teenager. Then I went to Syracuse and was undecided in the School of Public Communications. I thought I would do photography, but then I took a film class on directing in my junior year. Our professor showed us clips from a ton of art-house cinema, which, at the time, I had almost no exposure to. I had no idea films could look like that. One day in class, he showed us some clips from Wong Kar-wai's films, like 2046 and In the Mood for Love. 

I went home that day and watched In the Mood Love by myself and was blown away. 

Part of that class was making your first film, and of course, I wanted to make something like In Mood for Love. I ended up making my first film called KILL GREEN. It's very much a student film. It’s not great, but it was important to my start [as a filmmaker]. I was looking for a composer for that film and randomly connected with Cory on Instagram.  At the time, I had no idea he made music. I mentioned I was looking for a composer, and he said, “Oh, I make music,” and sent me some tracks he made for the UMD Film Club films. It was really good; it was orchestral, with string instruments, which I was looking for in KILL GREEN. That's how it started. Now, we are on our fourth film together.

Bespoke Notes: How do your skill sets complement each other? 

Chelsie Pennello: It comes naturally because he's a composer and I'm a director, but we co-write together; Cherry-Colored Funk, the new short we’ll be on the festival circuit with this year, is the second film we’ve co-written. The first one we co-wrote was the second film I made in college, Moth Song. It didn't get into any festivals, but I'm very proud of it. It was a significant step forward in both our careers. 

We're very aligned in taste. Many people can have good taste but still be very different in terms of what they like more in films. We’re naturally aligned regarding the things we're interested in. There's never a time when we're not on board for the type of art we want to make. That’s made it easy to collaborate.

Cory Blair: We have similar tastes and share an excitement for risk-taking. When creating a soundtrack for a film we're working on together, I can truly try anything because we're both very excited about bold and daring sounds. The two art forms, music and film, complement each other. It’s a collaborative relationship where we both end up with a separate product that can stand independently but enhances the other. 

Bespoke Notes: Can you expand the concept of having similar tastes beyond bold and daring?

Chelsie Pennello: We're both big fans of Paul Schrader's work, particularly how he ends his films. First Reformed, a movie we love, inspired Mandarins and Cherry-Colored Funk.

Cory Blair: Many [Paul Schrader’s] films end with the main character transcending somehow. It's not a pure metaphor, but it's also not textual what happens. It's this weird in-between where you can read it in many ways. It goes beyond what’s canonically happening in the film. 

Chelsie Pennello: His endings operate on a different, surreal plane from the rest of the film. They transcend their reality momentarily.

Bespoke Notes: This is giving us Lost vibes. If you’ve seen it, the show's ending is very ambiguous. You find yourself questioning everything, including the characters' reality or plane.

Bespoke Notes: Many people see filmmaking as the pinnacle of storytelling, similar to an impactful poem that stays with you: brief, emotional, and complex. What about the short film format, which brings a story to life and completion in a compressed timeframe, speaks to you? Why not make a full feature?

Chelsie Pennello: This is a great question because we would love to do a feature, which is the next goal.

Mandarins was our first foray into serious filmmaking—into making something that looked like it could have been made by a studio, that felt like a real indie film, and no longer like a student film. 

Over the last four years, shorts have been a wonderful learning opportunity for both of us. We’ve learned so much and been able to take bigger risks. With shorts, you need fewer resources to do them. The shoots take less time; it’s more condensed. It’s allowed us to experiment more freely and learn how to do [serious filmmaking]. 

Cory Blair: Yes, the goal is to make feature-length films. The goal with the shorts is to cut our teeth, get practice, and accrue a body of work to show we can do this well. It also offers an opportunity to take certain risks and follow story structures that would not work in any other format. 

With Cherry-Colored Funk, we experimented more with that film than with Mandarins, which could have been snipped from a feature. Cherry-Colored Funk could only work as a short due to its structure, rhythms, and particularly the use of music in the soundtrack. The film takes place in an Italian Ice shop. The young, disaffected female employee is pumping this experimental, weird, eclectic DJ set that spans the entirety of the short and bridges the gap between diegetic music [diegetic, meaning in-universe. The characters can hear it, unlike non-diegetic music, which only the audience can hear, and is more traditional ], playing as a soundtrack. Because it's also diegetic, it affects the plot; The characters are forced to respond to it, and eventually, the climax is extended around it.

You couldn't do that with a feature. When we first had the idea, I thought, “Is this going to be gimmicky? Is it going to feel like a music video?” We're going to have people in this intense headspace for so long. For it to be as prominent as it needs to be, it must play continuously.

Bespoke Notes: You talk about having a soft spot for telling stories about offbeat characters and unexpected moments of grace. Is that reflective of your own lives or specific tastes?

Chelsie Pennello: I wouldn't say specific life experiences. It's more of a general philosophy. We noticed a pattern when we looked at the body of the work thus far. What we both like in film and continue to pursue in future films is giving characters who could easily be hated and looked down upon some dignity in the end. This zoomed out feeling of these characters represent the humanity in all of us; all of us are fuck ups and there still can be moments of beauty in the suffering. 

Cory Blair: The word dignity: giving characters a moment of dignity is good. It’s validating them, their person, and their struggle in the eyes of the audience, when maybe no one in the universe gives them any respect. [Our recent movie] is about a Chinese-American scumbag hustler who changes his name to Roberto Ferrari. It's ridiculous, but that's not the point of the film. We needed a moment where we stripped out that his name is Roberto Ferrari and portrayed him as a human with goals, shame, pain, and validated the human experience.

Bespoke Notes: How can young filmmakers begin to elevate their work's aesthetic, quality, and sophistication?

Cory Blair: Filmmaking, of all the art forms, has a monetary barrier of entry with the amount of equipment and other things you need. You need more than music or writing. You need a crew. With music and sound, use film references. And there's so much that I learned on my own about how to mix films and make soundtracks, through [resources like] YouTube.

Chelsie Pennello: Many films I've seen have been made for nothing. They don't look like they were shot on the best technology, because they weren't. But they have a great story. [You think], “This is a real filmmaker; this is a very good story.” And those have been inspiring. 

Two films that are super low budget and shot on some shitty equipment are Festen by Thomas Vinterberg and Yeast by Mary Bronstein. Yeast was made with a $4,000 budget over a weekend. They didn't use any movie lights. Both are excellent films. They’re both streaming on The Criterion Channel. 

One key is making deliberate choices that serve the story. The entire basis of the student film that I made in college was aesthetic choices. It's about being intentional and thinking about choices in every aspect of the process: design, production design, editing, pacing, music, and tone, and making those choices because they're right for the story, not because you're interested in a particular aesthetic. 

Cory Blair: [Festen] is an inspiring one, because it was part of the “Dogme 95 ethos”: nothing that's not in the scene can be used. No extra lights, no nondiegetic music. It all had to be shot handheld, and they ended up with a feature-length movie that looks like someone's home video. But then you watch it, and the writing and performances are so good; it's cohesive and flows well.

Bespoke Notes: Is there a consistent emotional thread in your film scores?

Cory Blair: I don't know about an emotional thread, but there are functional threads. We’re always trying to transcend literalism in the film scores. For example, if you get a scene, your first instinct is to write music that hits the same emotional notes and enhances the scene. There's a time and place for that. But some of our favorite instances of [film] music defy that. Instead of enhancing the surface-level aesthetic of the scene or the emotion of a scene, it brings out something unseen that was hidden; maybe the audience wasn't paying attention to it. And maybe we can use this music to work on another level, to bring attention to a character arc, to an emotion in the scene that might not be immediately apparent, or a character's place in the journey.

It’s music that asks the viewer an additional question, instead of trying to blend in.

Bespoke Notes: How does this play into the film-length movie score you’re making for your short film, Cherry Colored-Funk, ahead of its premiere at the Florida Film Festival this month?

Cory Blair:  I've always been super interested in listening to DJ mixes that draw from various sources—different periods, genres, and [regions], but are still somehow able to make it feel like a cohesive experience. The DJ mix in the film draws heavily from that ethos. It starts as a Western, then transitions into an '80s electro vibe, to an IDM beat, to a Latin American section, to a guitar-heavy funk section, and finally ramps up into some avant-garde noise. Then it circles back to Western. The score in the film is only 14 minutes long and makes super quick transitions. I always wondered, “What if we were in the universe? What would the complete DJ mix sound like?” I thought it would be cool to expand those sections. Instead of sampling various music, I'm writing and producing various genres, which has been a really fun challenge.

Bespoke Notes: You’re expanding the life of the film without filming more scenes, which is interesting.

Cory Blair: Yes, we laid enough groundwork in the film that now this project can take on a life of its own, separate from the picture. 

Bespoke Notes: What’s next for Yumeji House Pictures? And how do you go through the process of deciding on the next project?

Chelsie Pennello: We've been working on a script. We’ve got the loose act one and act two done. The pattern has been spending a year writing, a year making the film, and then the following year is the festival run, and more writing. In the years when we’re in production on a film, a lot of the ideation for the next project happens.

I enjoy thinking about an idea for a year before writing. We do a lot of brainstorming sessions. We've had a lot of brainstorming sessions for films while taking long walks in the city and on long car rides. We were thinking about this feature idea the whole time last year while we were producing Cherry-Colored Funk. Now, we're desperately trying to get a bad first draft done to capitalize on the momentum of this year’s festival circuit.

Cory Blair: Because we're thinking about the next film while working on the current one, it becomes a conversation between two projects. Sometimes it’s a rebellion against a project. Cherry-Colored-Funk is so different from Mandarins, a slow-burning family drama and dark comedy. That style of film dominated the last festival circuit. We would watch entire blocks that are all about family tragedy. What excited us about Cherry-Colored Funk was thinking about what we would have loved to see on the festival circuit—a loud, in-your-face, and chaotic film. That’s the genesis. 

For the future, we're gonna make the quietest film we've ever made. We want it to be slow and introspective because Cherry Colored-Funk was so fast-paced.

Follow Yumeji House Pictures @yumejihousepictures.