Film Show 061: Charlotte Zhang
An interview with the Los Angeles-based filmmaker about the necessity of mythologizing, narrativizing historical events as vengeance, and her debut feature film 'Tycoon' (2026)
Charlotte Zhang
Charlotte Zhang (b. 1999) is a Canadian filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Zhang got her start as an artist through the Nanaimo Art Gallery, and has produced works in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, zines, laser-printed collages, and multi-channel video installations. Her debut feature film is Tycoon (2026), a tremendous low-budget imagining of dystopian Los Angeles. Set shortly before the 2028 Olympics, the film follows two twenty-somethings—Lito (Miguel Padilla-Juarez) and Jay (Jon Lawrence Reyes)—over a loosely-plotted 90 minutes that freely move between different registers and textures. Shot on her iPhone, MiniDV, and Super 8—and incorporating Xeroxed photographs as well as props she made herself—Zhang captures the beauty and grotesqueries, humor and banalities present in Los Angeles and its people.
Tycoon draws from Zhang’s research into the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and considers the throughlines that both connect and shape historical events past, present, and future. Inspired in part by Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978), Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole (1998), and Isiah Medina’s 88:88 (2015), Tycoon was one of the major highlights at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film will also screen this weekend as part of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Zhang on February 24th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss the musical nature of her editing, how she made a film on a low budget, and the necessity of mythologizing historical events.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: In your Paradise Holds Itself Shut zine, your mini-bio says that you’re “interested in reenactments of shared fantasy, social scripts produced by spectacle, the perpetual collapse of punishment and celebration; vengeance.” Have you ever enacted vengeance in a satisfying—or even unsatisfying—way? What’s your relationship with vengeance?
Charlotte Zhang: (laughs). That’s such a good question. I have, but I can’t go into detail. I’m interested in vengeance as an ambivalent concept. I’m interested in the ethical, political, and ideological consequences of vengeance and why certain events are narrativized as revenge. What does it mean to narrativize a historical event as revenge? Often, people will invoke revenge to place themself in a diminished or underdog position, even if that’s not necessarily true—it serves a purpose. I’m interested in all the different ways it might manifest, whether revolutionary, transgressive, or regressive. And I think that’s apparent throughout my work.
Where did this interest stem from?
Since I was a kid, I was interested in revenge as a form of personal justice, fragile as it might be. Where I grew up was racially alienating, at least at the time, and I was trying to narrativize my experience in that light as a way to move through it, without the feeling lingering too long. I grew up on Vancouver Island in this city called Nanaimo. There are aspects of it that are great—it’s visually very stunning. By the time I was 15 or so, I was doing art programs at the Nanaimo Art Gallery and I was exposed to this contemporary arts education for free. I don’t want to understate the importance of that.
Nanaimo had a motley mix of people—it’s a former coal-mining town, and there’s a lot of history with Chinese workers. It’s a funny mix of rednecks and draft dodgers, so it has this dated form of progressive politics. There was a sense from very early on that I wasn’t interested in inclusion—it wasn’t something I was meant to aspire to; it wasn’t a question of whether or not I’d be included because I just wasn’t. I don’t hold any resentment—it’s a historically and visually interesting place and I do like to go back—but it wasn’t the most fun environment to grow up in.
Can you talk to me about the art programs at the gallery?
I was exposed to the work of a lot of artists, and they had a treasure trove of art catalogues and photography books that I would pore over. They would invite artists like Elizabeth Milton to come in and do workshops. There was an application process that I did when I was 15, where I wrote about Nan Goldin, and when I was a bit older they put me into exhibitions in the gallery. I still work with Jesse Birch, the curator there—he’s really sick.
Were your parents supportive of everything?
My parents were super supportive—they were psyched when I got into art school. People get surprised when I mention that. My mom paints and she’s a writer, but both my parents are people who are interested in arts and culture. I’ve always had the freedom to explore that, and I’ve never had any blowback to pursuing this.
Do you see any qualities of your parents in yourself?
I’ve been thinking a lot more deeply about the context they grew up in being the end of the Cultural Revolution—their understanding of gender roles and independence and liberation. I think those things affected me very deeply and the way I move through the world. I remember when I was growing up, my grandpa would say things like, “High heels are bourgeois,” so I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to conform to a lot of feminine rituals or forms of presentation. I never had to contend with these traditional roles for women. They also have a sense of cynicism that I really appreciate. Having lived through such an immense part of latter-20th-century Chinese history, with so many shifts occurring in such a short span of time, they have a healthy suspicion of things that happen in the world. That’s definitely part of who I am.
You work in different mediums—what was your first work that was exhibited?
When I was 16, this really great artist named Ron Tran had a retrospective at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, and he invited local artists to recreate works he had made in the past. The one I did had to do with salvaged family photographs, and my mom gave me photographs from when she and her American friends toured New Orleans jazz bands throughout China in the 1990s. I think those performances led to the formation of a Chinese jazz festival. So, I used those photographs and it was the first time I had something in a real gallery. I don’t remember how I felt about the experience though; it was more about the making of the work. And today, that’s still what’s most interesting to me. I like that someone can receive the work and have a reaction to it, whether positive or negative, but the making of the work is really compelling to me. I was working with textiles for the first time and, at the end of the show, Ron Tran copy-pasted hundreds of gigabytes worth of movies from his hard drive onto mine. I was watching through those as a teenager.
What led you to filmmaking?
I wanted to be a filmmaker first, but I just got around to making that work later. I would watch music videos very religiously as a kid. I didn’t watch a lot of movies until I was 12, and then I watched A Clockwork Orange (1971) at a friend’s house and, from then on, I taught myself how to write screenplays. I didn’t start making films until I was 16 or so, and I don’t know if any of those still exist. To this day, I feel like I’m less interested in the art world than I am with film. It’s been my goal to work in feature-length filmmaking for a long time, but it’s a long process; having a shorter process, and the result of your thinking appear sooner, is a shortcut of working through certain ideas.
It’s really obvious when watching Tycoon (2026) that you love music. What music videos were you watching as a teenager? What fascinated you? And what do you feel like you’ve learned from studying music videos?
At the time, Kanye West’s “Runaway.” That’s one of my all-time favorite videos. And then there was Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” and “Telephone.” Those were by Jonas Åkerlund. I was interested in these visually propulsive music videos. I hope that my films don’t resemble music videos—that isn’t the goal of the work. It’s more so that I intended it to resemble music. I studied classical piano for 11 years, and I have the Royal Conservatory degree or whatever that is. I was really serious about it, and that skillset—of interpreting sheet music, of pacing, of structure—is really essential to me as an artist. Even when I’m editing, there are certain things I’m thinking about. I’m wondering how a leitmotif moves between hands, between keys, and what it means to have a theme and variations, and what happens when a theme returns further in the song, in a different context, and what has been changed as a result of what has occurred beforehand. So there’s a lot of things I’m thinking about, like, “Oh, this is a passage I have to play staccato, how do I translate that to film?”
Is this mostly an instinctual thing?
There’s a certain relationship between the images and the sound, but as I’m building it out and refining it, I’m thinking about what passage of the composition it is, I’m thinking about symphonic voices. In Tycoon, there are a lot of motifs that appear as sound, image, and text, and then there’s voiceover that travels through it, and I’m thinking of musical themes that play throughout different symphonic voices. It’s similar to collage, where you’re thinking about combinations that feel explosive and exciting, and once you place them, you’re thinking about how they should be melded together musically.
Does this musical thinking come into play with your other visual art? You have your laser-printed Joyride pieces, for example, as well as PINUP where you’re creating a sort of sculpture from different materials.
It’s less, which is why I enjoy it less. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it or think that this visual art is not complete, but it’s like a musical study versus a sonata: it’s a shorthand version of an idea I’m exploring, whereas with film I’m fleshing it out. With collage, it feels like editing exercises to see what it means to place certain images in relation to one another. Not having the dimension of time, or having a sonic dimension, makes it a way of working through ideas.
Can you give me an example of how working on these collages informed the way you approached your filmmaking?
Those works were the result of a lot of reading and research, so they compelled me to do that, and they also helped me contextualize and work with that research instead of just putting it on display as evidence. There’s a lot of shared research between that work, especially with regards to 20th-century LA history. There’s certain archival footage in the film that’s related to this research too. I was also thinking about color and visual gags—there’s a sense of humor—and I’m creating a narrative flow out of this historical research to make it entertaining. Those works were also made with the help of friends and artists who were involved in the making of Tycoon, including Carlos Agredano, Vincent Hernandez, and my friend Kenneth Yuen, so there’s a throughline there.
Can you talk about the importance of humor in making art? What’s valuable about humor, and what function does it play in your work?
That’s a good question. In the midst of turmoil and violence, absurd situations arise that are incidentally funny. That’s part of the human experience. My friend Vincent’s dad is a photojournalist who was on the ground during the ’92 uprising, and he was telling me that for months after, there were just the best yard sales ever because people were selling their looted goods. That anecdotal history adds a layer of richness that makes it more complete for me, that helps me understand and process it. I always knew this was gonna be the case, but there are jokes in the film that are particular to LA. You show it in Europe and there are things that are not recognized, which is totally fine, but in that way, there’s another dimension—there’s another way that the film can be understood.
What was it like showing Tycoon in Rotterdam? What were you surprised by?
I was surprised that the Q&As were so friendly. I’ve seen some film festival Q&As that feel like struggle sessions (laughter). And that’s interesting too. When there are shared tensions in response to something in the film, someone can release that valve and it can be explored in a way that’s productive. I was curious if there were any aspects of the film that would pose that kind of challenge, but I was told later that it’s common for Rotterdam audiences to be more interested in technical aspects, in the process of making it. I thought the response was good, but maybe I’m not so observant and I was just talking my shit on stage and then said, “Okay, thanks for coming!” (laughter). I’ve never had this big an audience for any work before, so it was a little shocking. I didn’t think there’d be so many emails. It’s nice to have work out in the world in that way.
You mentioned that art serves as a pretext for research. In the zine I mentioned earlier, you have citations from Dylan Rodriguez, Barbara Voss, Kerry Abrams, and others. Can you talk to me about the research you’ve done and what you feel are the topics you keep coming back to? In reflecting on your work, do you feel like there are certain ideas you keep revisiting?
When I look at all the work I’ve made throughout the years, I wonder if it’s all incoherent, but as I make more work, I see that I’m interested in collective experience of a particular moment in history. I’m interested in the mythologies and iconographies that remain from events and periods in history, and how we contend with them in the present day—how they’re reconfigured, subsumed, and then consumed once again. I think I’ll start to understand this better when I make more work, but I do think it’s ultimately about contending with a collective experience of history, which is unstable and partially—not to mention necessarily—mythological.
Why is mythologizing necessary?
I think mythologizing allows us to fulfill a collective desire. I’ve been going back through Eric Hobsbawm’s Bandits (1969) and he talks about how in times of turmoil and intensified violence, as a form of collective catharsis, we seek to construct a violence avenger who can do what others are not willing to do. I’m also placing that in relation to the rise of “dark woke” (laughter), and these sorts of discourses. It’s so Hobsbawmian! When we produce these mythologies and archetypes, they have these gravitational pulls that swallow a lot of historical narratives and experiences. So it’s about unearthing those.
Do you feel like you mythologize yourself at all? And this could be with art or maybe just in how you live your life. Maybe there’s just a mythologizing aspect to just being alive.
Right, like it comes from being perceived and in any public sphere. I don’t know about mythologizing, but I am aware that there are certain ways that I am made legible, especially in a racial sense. I was always interested in ways of manipulating that, like, what does it mean to work with that awareness or understanding? As I plan more films and projects, I am thinking more about what it means to be an artist out in the world, where there’s public information about you out there. I think my tendency is to be private, but I do have the responsibility of presenting my own work, and I do believe in its longevity. As with anyone else who grew up on the internet, I am paranoid about what’s out there. I’m sure there’s some random debris, and that’s fine, but my impulse is to keep wiping the slate clean… but I can’t (laughs). I do think being on the internet as a young person and having public debates and conversations gives you a thick skin.
I wanted to ask about your interest in Los Angeles. You initially came because you went to CalArts. When was the moment you knew you loved LA?
The first weekend there before school started, I took the train down into the city because I got tickets to see To Sleep with Anger (1990). I went with my friends Kennedy [Arnette Mitchell] and Justin [Pineda], who are both in Tycoon and my past films. We watched this movie, it was amazing, and I talked with Charles Burnett—I don’t remember what I said, it was probably embarrassing. There was an open backroom in the theater and we swiped an open bottle of wine and were walking down this street, passing it around and taking swigs. It was the best thing ever.
When did you go to your first [street] takeover?
I think it was in 2020. I knew of their existence and I thought they were one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, but I’d yet to catch one. I lived on an intersection where they didn’t happen very often because it’s a smaller intersection, but there was one night—out of the blue—where it happened. Since then I’ve been completely obsessed. I was very lucky to have a friend who’s involved in the scene, who let me tag along and shoot the one you see in the film.
How do you approach shooting them? Is there a specific visual language you’re aiming for?
There’s footage in existence that’s just unbelievable, where people are running into the center of the pit. Everybody’s filming at a takeover—they’ve all got their phones and cameras out—so you’re just part of the crowd. I was chatting with a few people because I had this old, bulky MiniDV camera and people were curious if I was making a movie. When you shoot on this very wide-angle lens, the motion is so dynamic—it really feels so extreme when the car swings back around from the other side of the intersection and almost runs into you. I’ve been enjoying shooting handheld in general because it feels like you’re holding up a child to see the world (laughter). It’s like I have more affection for it, and I feel that most distinctly when I’m shooting takeovers. Seeing other people on each other’s shoulders, and raising the camera higher than my eyeline to capture something closer… both those things in parallel really makes me get this sense of the anthropomorphized object.
Can you talk about the auto shop that plays a heavy role in your filmmaking process? I know you edited the film there—what was that like?
The car shop doesn’t exist anymore, but it cycled through a lot of iterations. For a long time it had art studios, and there were backyard music shows around once a month. There was a lot going on, and I’d spend a few days a week there. So much of the film was shot in and around the car shop, and I was editing in the back corner, while Kenneth was working on cars in front of me. I was already imagining less of a reliance on synchronized sound, or at least having the freedom to move in and out of that, so being there worked out because it’s so loud, even with headphones—there’s the sound of the tools, of hardware hitting the ground, of trucks in the background, of the lift going up and down. I cut a lot of the rapid montage sequences in the shop, and I got a sense of the rhythm independent of any sound I had.
I’m assuming you have a car?
I don’t know how to drive, I don’t even have my license (laughter). I should. I don’t know what problem I have; I think you have to compartmentalize when you’re driving so you’re not thinking about the wildness of the thing you’re doing. I just can’t conceptualize getting used to it enough where I can do that. Thankfully, I have a lot of friends who love driving and we’ll cruise around. Walking and taking the bus is nice because I’ll encounter a lot of strangers, and I’ll get into a lot of conversations with people at the bus stop or from going on walks.
Is there a particularly memorable conversation you’ve struck up with a stranger?
The scene in the film where they’re making fun of the guy in the five-toed shoes, I was actually sitting on the bus once and having a great conversation with someone next to me, and there was a white guy in front of us wearing them. The guy I was talking with stopped the conversation and said something even crazier [than what’s in the film] and I think the guy could hear us (laughter). That was one of my favorite bus conversations for sure, so it made its way into the film. I think his name was Melo, like Carmelo—I hope he’s doing well, wherever he is.
There are scenes in the movie where we’re in the car and nobody’s talking. Can you talk about the thinking behind those passages? I thought those were really beautiful scenes. There’s an implied intimacy when you’re silent in the car with someone.
I like that it can go both ways. It can be this total serenity and comfort with somebody, or it can be like… there’s something unspoken that everybody is afraid to unleash in the car because you can’t escape it, and the place is too small, and the way you sound when you speak in it is too enclosed. You really have to commit to a confrontation in a car if you’re going to have one (laughter). Do you remember that meme that’s like “When you’re on your way home from the club but one of you almost died”? (laughter).
What sort of things do you feel you’ve learned about Los Angeles as a result of making Tycoon? What questions were posed and where’d you end up?
Wow, that’s a good one. I learned that the neighborhood I live in, which is situated between Koreatown and South Central, was quite active during the ’92 uprising. An owner of a store down the street was telling me that his father, who used to own the store, was really terrified of looters coming in and that he sat at the door with his gun. It was a Black-owned store, and people just came in regularly and were saying, “Hey, what’s up!” and just bought stuff and left. I thought that was funny and interesting. I was also understanding which buildings were actually affected. I know that the Winchell’s Donuts was set on fire.
I was also really interested in the throughline between the 1984 Olympics and the ’92 uprising, how the militarization of the police, the formation of these task forces, increased funding, and increased access to this Draconian technology—and the displacement and widening of the socioeconomic gap—set the stage for the ’92 uprising. I was reading a lot of different essays and books, but I also took the opportunity to chat with random neighbors and people who lived in my neighborhood. I asked people who lived here in the ’90s what they remembered. Those were some of the most interesting stories.
How did hearing these stories shape the film? Did it inform the process or how you wanted specific things depicted?
It was the more mundane horrors. I think people don’t talk enough about that process of “rebuilding.” There’s this whole thing with the Rebuild Los Angeles project, which was headed by Peter Ueberroth. It was a total disaster and none of those promises were fulfilled. A lot of South Central was left ravaged for months and months after, and it was never given the resources to recover. The intense public spectacle of the violence in those few days produced all these iconic images and discourse, and that meant the more quotidian violences could remain obfuscated.
I was also thinking a lot about the feeling of living in LA before the riots, during the Rodney King trial, and then in the months afterwards. Living through that kind of intensity, you do feel a sense of dread. I watched Strange Days (1995) recently and I was like, wow, what a budget [Kathryn Bigelow] had—the tanks in the street! If I don’t have the resources to orchestrate that, how do I illustrate this sense of being monitored, of being enclosed? How do I do that with the materials I have at hand, and with the things I see in the city every day?
How are you directing your actors? And I need a sense of the timeline here regarding when you shot Tycoon and when the shooting of Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism (2025) happened, given that you star in that.
That was in early 2024, and it was really amazing being on that set because, until Tycoon, I hadn’t made a film in a few years. It allowed me to become familiar with being on a set environment again, and knowing how Isiah and Kelley [Dong] ran everything was really helpful on a fundamental level.
For Tycoon, I had written this 130-page script and I ended up rewriting it. We did a bunch of weekend shoots over the course of about a year. I didn’t construct it in a way that would make it malleable and porous, where I could patch together new scenes and remove others; I was doing that in the time in between shoots. I was at a loss for how to start and Isiah was like, “Do you have one or two scenes where you have the location and props?” “Yeah.” “Just shoot it and see what happens.” So I did that and kept going and going until it was done. I don’t think I could do that again, but I think I was also just so excited to shoot.
There’s this quote from Cronenberg—and I think we made our debut films at the same age, which is quite lovely—where someone asked him about Stereo (1969). They asked him why he shot it on 35mm instead of 16mm, and he said that the desire to make a film he could recognize as “a real film” was compulsive. I really felt the same way. Every week I tried to have a new location ready. I would make sure the actors knew well enough in advance what scenes we were shooting. I wanted to make sure everybody’s schedules were aligned. The crew was usually just me, and I would set up the sound equipment, and then do a quick tutorial with whatever friend was down to help that day.
With the actors, they were already friends of mine—Jon [Lawrence Reyes], or JJ, is the little brother of a friend. For the first shoots, we had rehearsals. We’d pick through the scenes with more dialogue and see if any of the wording was awkward and then rework sentences so they’d flow in the best possible way. I felt they were really easy to work with, and I really commend them. Directors say that when you work with first-time actors or non-professional actors, people tend to disappear mid-shoot, they won’t be committed. These actors showed up every shoot for the course of a year, which is really incredible.
I gotta ask about the music, which you really let breathe in the film. There’s Dinah Washington; Earth, Wind & Fire; Cindy Lee. How did you know what songs to use and how long they’d last? Were these just songs you loved?
For the most part, these are songs that I was obsessively listening to while I was writing the script, so they became very important to the film itself. Basically, we shot a lot on Sundays because that was the day people would reliably have off, and Sundays are also when they have the Art Laboe [radio] show. There’s a certain Art Laboe show homage in the film: marking when oldies appear is a way of marking time, of marking Sundays. These were songs I really loved, and a couple of them were songs I heard for the first time on the show. Also, learning about the production model of Killer of Sheep (1978) inspired me to make this film, and so “This Bitter Earth” was my homage to it. In terms of spacing the songs, it goes back to the process of editing. I was thinking about what segments would be legible as melodic, and how that interacts with the sound design before and after.
What about Killer of Sheep inspired you?
It was just the fact that he shot it over weekends for a year. He had the kids in his neighborhood record the sound. It’s a film that feels part of my DNA now, and I’ve seen it quite a few times. It’s a film I’m passionate about, but while I was shooting it, there wasn’t a conscious reproduction of things, though the music selection in that film is amazing too. There’s also a musicality to the structure. He lets sequences breathe. He hits these unexpected cadences that don’t always… land on the tonic (laughter). They’re a bit unresolved and they can lift up to the next sequence, and there’s a real flow to it that I really adore. So, reading about the production of that film and hearing Isiah’s advice really made me feel like it was possible to make this film on a small budget.
Were there any problems you faced because of the budget?
I ended up saving a lot of money on locations because of the car shop and the surrounding areas, but also because there were places I knew I could shoot in public without much of a bother. I had an understanding of these locations and who lived around there, so I saved a lot on that. My biggest workaround was doing a lot of roles myself. I don’t know if I would do that again. I enjoyed it a lot, but I do think it took over my life in a way that I don’t know is sustainable for the next three pictures—we’ll have to see. I owned the cameras that this film was shot on, and I even made the props myself—the delivery robot was made out of a garden wagon, fiberglass, and BMW headlights. Seeing how much I could fabricate with my own hands—that was big. Hopefully I’m able to work with a larger budget for the next film.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I’m genuinely so curious about whoever I encounter, and it’s really nice to ask questions and find the ones that get people interested in talking. I get to hear about some really incredible experiences and ideas, and I appreciate that I have that ability to talk with others. As much as I was talking shit about Nanaimo earlier, there is this quality that strangers will get into unexpected conversations with you. That’s one of my favorite aspects of Nanaimo, and I bring that with me in my day-to-day life.
Charlotte Zhang’s Tycoon premiered at this year’s edition of IFFR. It plays at this year’s edition of Doc Fortnight this weekend. More details can be found here.
Charlotte’s Picks
A list of albums and compositions that have been influential to me in regards to editing and thinking about filmic structure, in no particular order.
Sly and the Family Stone - There’s a Riot Goin’ On (Epic, 1971)
Shawty Pimp & MC Spade - Volume 1 (self-released, 1994)
The Ronettes - Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes (Philles, 1964)
Olivier Messiaen - Quartet For the End of Time (Éditions Durand, 1940-1941)
DJ Screw - Bigtyme Vol II: All Screwed Up (Bigtyme Recordz, 1995)
Gustav Mahler - Symphony No. 9 (IV. Adagio) (Universal Edition, 1909/1912)
Throbbing Gristle - 20 Jazz Funk Greats (Industrial, 1979)
Claude Debussy - The Sunken Cathedral (1910)
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