Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Hyunsoo Moon

Filmmaker

filmmaker’s first feature: “The Americans”

I came to America from South Korea when I was eleven years old. For years, I grappled with what it meant to be Korean-American—caught between two cultures, never fully belonging to either. That experience became the lens through which I see the world, and ultimately the reason I made this film. In 2019, during the height of anti-immigrant rhetoric, I traveled to Storm Lake, Iowa—a small town where refugees from Laos, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Latin America had been rebuilding their lives around a meatpacking plant for decades. The media coverage I found was well-intentioned but shallow. Immigrants were portrayed as either victims to be pitied or symbols of resilience to be celebrated. Rarely were they allowed to simply be people—with dreams, contradictions, humor, and exhaustion. I wanted to bridge that gap. So I spent the next seven years following four people: Sam, a Laotian man in his sixties who worked the Tyson line for twenty-two years before being let go during COVID; Jephthah, a Karen man from Myanmar who dreamed of getting his GED for a better job; Anna, a South Sudanese woman who left nursing school to send money home and never quite found her way back; and Ehler, a fifteen-year-old Karen girl carrying the weight of her family’s expectations while dreaming of college. THE AMERICANS is not a film about immigration policy. It ’s a film that invites everyone into these people’s lives and asks if we can all agree about what happiness means for all of us—to connect to one another, to want the best for our children, and to have peace—and if we can all agree on that, we can try to get there together, instead of shutting each other out, and redefine the identity of what it means to be AMERICAN, an identity not based on race, heritage, or birthright, but based on an idea, an idea about the right for all humans to be happy.

Hyunsoo Moon has always loved movies since he was a kid, growing up on 80s and 90s action movies, like Die Hard and Terminator 2. After college, he worked as a location scout in Massachusetts for 4 years. In 2010, he moved to Los Angeles to work as an editor. Since then, he has worked on many genres, ranging from reality TV, documentaries, to scripted television. In 2018, he won the Los Angeles Emmy Award for Outstanding Editor. He is currently working on his first feature film “The Americans,” a story of immigrants in Storm Lake, Iowa, chasing their American dreams to escape the life of working at a meatpacking plant.