An acclaimed environmental artist and first-time filmmaker, Kit-Yin Snyder uses double-exposed imagery to convey the duality of immigrant identity—a notion that she has been living out ever since she left China as a teenager. The result is DOUBLE EXPOSURE, a short film that pairs Snyder’s no-holds-barred candor and self-effacing humor with beautiful, haunting visuals drawn from the Chinese culture she left behind.

Born in Guangzhou, China, Snyder immigrated to the United States in 1949, when she was 15 years old. In the ensuing decades, she graduated with a degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan, married an American man, raised a daughter, survived breast cancer and became a visual artist, working with multimedia and nature and place to create environmental art installations. The woman she is now, Snyder says, is a far cry from the little Chinese girl she once was. In DOUBLE EXPOSURE, she returns to China for the first time since she left, setting out to track her evolution. Her film is a wry, pungent and unforgettable rumination on the gaps between the Chinese and American views on women, marriage, age, beauty, family, food and communication, and a personal quest to discover where in the gap she fits. As Snyder says, "I think of the film as a way of looking at myself in the mirror, and seeing my reflection in a mask that continually fluctuates between East and West."