Cami Kwan turns an Angel Island family story into the handcrafted stop-motion short ‘Paper Daughter’

Writer, director and animator Cami Kwan is bringing a family history rooted in Angel Island immigration processing to the screen in the handcrafted stop-motion animated short Paper Daughter, which is being discussed at the Annecy festival.

In an interview, Kwan said the project began with a story that had been passed down in her family for generations. The account traces back to her great-grandmother, Joy Dep Chan, who immigrated from China in 1926 through Angel Island by assuming another girl’s identity, according to Kwan’s recounting of the family history.

Kwan described Paper Daughter as an attempt to translate that complicated past into a film form that emphasizes texture and physical craft. She said the choice of stop-motion animation allowed her to treat the narrative as something built by hand, rather than rendered in a purely digital workflow.

The short centers on the human cost and personal stakes of immigration, including the kinds of decisions families made to navigate the rules and procedures of early 20th-century entry to the United States. Kwan’s framing, as reflected in the interview, ties those pressures to an individual life story while still pointing to broader patterns of migration and paperwork.

Kwan also positioned the film as a work of family memory, saying the project grew from her connection to Joy Dep Chan’s experience and from the larger meaning of Angel Island as a place associated with processing and detention for many Chinese immigrants and other arrivals during that era.

The Annecy conversation about Paper Daughter highlights the continuing cultural resonance of Angel Island histories as filmmakers, families, and scholars revisit how immigration policy and identity documentation shaped lives. In Kwan’s case, the film is intended to put those themes into a form audiences can experience through character, visual detail, and the slow movement characteristic of stop-motion.

Paper Daughter, as described in the interview, is being developed as a short animated work rather than a feature-length production, and Kwan’s statements emphasize how scale and craft decisions are part of the storytelling approach. The project’s next steps, including any broader release or distribution beyond festival discussion, were not detailed in the cited reporting.