Three USC student filmmakers have been recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, including one USC alumna who has been named a finalist for the Student Academy Awards.
The Student Academy Awards are an annual competition presented by the Academy that celebrates and recognizes young, emerging creatives from all over the globe. Past winners have gone on to receive their own Academy Award statuette in later years.
Xindi Zhang, a 2025 graduate from USC’s expanded animation research and practice master’s program, is a finalist in the alternative/experimental film category for her short film “Song of the Drifters.”
“I’m thrilled to receive this recognition and look forward to seeing how far this film can go,” Xindi said in an emailed statement after it was announced as a finalist.
USC students have made a big splash in previous competitions. In 2020, 4 USC students were chosen as award winners, beating out over 1,400 applicants — the most winners from any university that year.
The winner of each category will receive a gold medal along with a cash prize of up to $5,000. On top of that, winners are eligible to compete in the following Oscar short film categories: Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film, or Documentary Short Film.
Zhang draws from her own personal history for her animated documentary. She proclaims herself as a drifter — someone who jumps around from city to city, not fully being able to call a place truly home. Zhang was born in southwestern China, later moving to China’s most populated city, Shanghai, when she was in high school. Once she graduated, Zhang made an even bigger life transition, deciding to travel over 7,000 miles away from her home country to study illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
During her undergraduate studies, Zhang spent a lot of time thinking about how people occupy space, and, in contrast, how that space influences humans themselves. For Zhang, her environment is always shifting. She no longer carries the accent of her hometown, she said, feeling distant from her roots whenever she returns.
“When people ask me, ‘where you’re from,’ that for me is a really hard question,” Zhang said. “That’s caused me some identity crisis. So that’s the starting point of making this film.”
While pursuing her master’s degree in Los Angeles, another city to check off from Zhang’s list of lived-in cities, she interviewed countless other drifters for the film, including immigrants and international students. Zhang said she reached out to these people to form a collective voice for the film — one that represents people who aren’t anchored down to a singular place.
“We are all drifters. This is our voice,” Zhang said.
Recent film and television production graduate Eduardo Maia conjured his own voice when sitting down to converse with his father for his short feature “Talk Straight, Duda,” a semifinalist in the documentary section. The film is a story about trauma and the relationship gay men have with their fathers — in this case, Maia with his own, with the ‘Duda’ in the title being a shortened version of his own first name.
“‘Talk straight, Duda’ is literally something my dad would tell me all the time. And what he was saying was ‘talk like a man,’” Maia said.
Growing up in Brazil, Maia enjoyed indulging in artistic hobbies such as filmmaking, shooting films on a camcorder with his cousin. He also fell in love with gymnastics, finding community along the mats and balance beams. However, those days dimmed once Maia started being bullied in school for being too “girly.” Out of shame, Maia packed up his camcorder and gymnastics shorts and hid himself away from his true self.
Maia said his father was an active participant in this shame, recalling an incident when his father was frowning upon another gay kid he knew in the past. “There was this gay boy in our lives back home that was close to the family, and I saw my dad kind of having homophobia towards this boy. He wasn’t being mean about it, but he was just kind of struggling with it,” Maia said.
This homophobia was painful for Maia, he said, leading him to produce and direct “Talk Straight, Duda,” where he could finally stand up for the boy he once was.
“In that moment, I came up with this idea of, ‘Wait, can I talk about these things?’” Maia said. “I still held [my father] accountable. It’s not like I told him it’s okay to be homophobic, but I did it in a way that was empathetic.”
Angela Wenyang Hou, who also graduated from the School of Cinematic Arts this spring with a Master’s in animation, was recognized as a semifinalist too in the alternative/experimental section for her short film “Nirvana.” The film, described as an “emotional journey through love, pain, and personal transformation” weaves together elements of dance, projection mapping and dance to cultivate an immersive experience centered around “female sensibility, resilience and self-renewal.” Hou was unable to comment on her piece.
Both Maia and Zhang are open to the idea of using new technologies. For example, Zhang’s film “Song of the Drifters” uses artificial intelligence (AI). She had decided that she was going to use AI for her film even before deciding on the topic, as she wanted to explore how her creativity can be improved.
“I really want to see if it’s possible to use AI as I make my stuff better or make me stronger, rather than [thinking] it will replace my job, replace my creativity,” Zhang said. “AI is just a tool. It’s all about you and how you want to use that.”
Maia shared Zhang’s feelings around AI, pointing to his experience working in the technology industry for many years. Maia said he used AI to fix one line in “Talk Straight, Duda,” after receiving permission from his dad.
“We had this one line that did not sound good, and we’re trying to fix it, and it’s just not working,” Maia said. “Then I was like, wait, why don’t we just regenerate that line using AI? Let me train my dad’s voice on this thing … We just did it, and it was very easy.”
Maia says that aspiring filmmakers shouldn’t be scared by these advances in technology.
“We’re at a time when technology is changing so much,” Maia said. “Anyone can make anything on their phones and put it up on any of the platforms that we know so well. So just get into it and start doing it.”
The winners will be revealed in late August, followed by a formal award presentation on October 6 at the New York Film Festival in the Ziegfeld Ballroom.