The time required for one unstable element to decay and transform into another. In Diablo Valley, California a complacent community struggles to adapt to a changing world where global chaos looms and threatens to alter life as they know it. As troubling worldwide disasters accelerate and reach into a complacent community, a brother and sister grapple with being abandoned by their father and the powerful presence of their mother's new boyfriend. The siblings are forced to take control of the chaos around them and reinvent everyone's lives.
Nineteen-year-old Pam Wu remembers her absent father with longing. She and 8-year- old Timothy live with their mother, Saura, who buries the shame of her husband's desertion by succumbing to the lustful attention of her younger boyfriend Wendell. Still, Saura can't conceal a bitter nostalgia for her youth, a time when she had love and purpose.
Pam's only friend Scott Parker, a restless Korean adoptee, confronts his fundamentalist parents with his sexuality, inadvertently affecting his closeted boyfriend Jonah with inescapable repercussions.
Wendell's powerful presence threatens to tear apart the Wu family, even as Scott's machinations backfire, jeopardizing things for himself, his parents, and Jonah. With catastrophe imminent, lines are crossed, secrets long repressed begin to emerge, and all are left to face their own selfishness and intolerance... until Timothy discovers a way to alter everyone's reality.
Jennifer Phang
As an Honoree for Film Independent’s Project: Involve, Phang worked under the mentorship of acclaimed director Tony Bui (Three Seasons). She was awarded the Talent Scout Writing Contest’s First Prize for co-writing the original one-hour pilot Simi Valley. Half-Life was developed at the Film Independent Directors' Lab under Rodrigo Garcia, and is Phang's first feature film. She was recently nominated for the Rockefeller Foundation's Film and Video Fellowship and was a finalist for the IFP/NY Adrienne Shelly Grant. She has several writing and directing projects in development including Faeries, 12 Valentines, and Walking in LA, written with Ben Berkowitz and Ben Redgrave.
