By：Will Jones

Written and directed by Jiang, who also served as Director of Photography, the 87-minute black-and-white feature uses a single 35mm lens, an entirely handheld camera and a performance-driven production process to inhabit the interior life of a woman rebuilding herself after prison.

LOS ANGELES.- Los Angeles appears to have recovered.

Restaurants are full. Traffic has returned. Palm trees still rise above bright storefronts and apartment blocks. Yet in Shan Jiang's So Far and From Now On, recovery is partly an illusion . Beneath the city's familiar surface, its inhabitants seem to have become more careful with one another, more conscious of boundaries, and less certain that intimacy can be trusted.

That atmosphere became the starting point for Jiang's first narrative feature .

Written and directed by Jiang, who also served as Director of Photography , So Far and From Now On follows Ellie, a Latina woman attempting to rebuild her life after thirty months in prison. She begins making and selling lamps online, but encounters with friends, family, strangers and people from her former life repeatedly return her to the fear she is trying to escape. The film had its world premiere at the 2026 Philadelphia Latino Arts & Film Festival and has since received Best International Feature at FICTLAX in Mexico and Best Narrative Feature at the Kookai International Film Festival.

For Jiang, however, the film began not with an award strategy or even a specific plot, but with a feeling about Los Angeles .

He and actress-producer Dominique Willette Campos had known one another through several short-film collaborations and began discussing what a longer, more character-centered project might look like. Jiang wanted to make a linear narrative in which nearly every scene remained grounded in the experience of a single protagonist�something closer in spirit to the intimate subjectivity of films such as Taxi Driver than to an ensemble-driven structure .

The post-pandemic city supplied the emotional landscape.

�Los Angeles looked alive again,� Jiang says. �People were going out, working, eating, having fun. But to me there was another layer underneath it. It felt like somebody who had once been very open and energetic, spent years isolated, and then came back into the world much more
careful about distance .�

Jiang became interested in the contradiction between the city's apparent openness and the private islands occupied by its residents. Digital life, social boundaries and an increasingly recorded world added to that perception . The film would therefore not treat Ellie's isolation as an exceptional pathology. Instead, her extreme situation�returning to society after prison�would magnify an uncertainty already present in the people surrounding her.

A title divided by courage

The title contains the film's architecture .

For Jiang, �so far� describes accumulation: everything Ellie has endured, concealed, feared or accepted until the present moment. �From now on� describes the instant at which accumulated experience finally creates a qualitative change.

Almost the entire film belongs to the first half of that equation .

Its final movement is built around something outwardly small: Ellie makes a choice that requires courage. Jiang intentionally avoids transforming that decision into a conventionally triumphant climax. The action is modest, but internally it divides her life into before and after.

�The important thing is not that courage suddenly solves everything,� he says. �It is that there can be one moment when a person finally takes the first step. Everything before that moment is �so far.� What comes after belongs to �from now on . ��

The film's online lamp business operates through a similar double function .

There was a practical reason for writing lamps into a black-and-white contemporary film. Jiang wanted practical light sources to play an active role in shaping different emotional environments without abandoning the naturalistic logic of the spaces .

But lamps also became an understated metaphor.

Ellie may reject much of the life around her, and the business itself eventually becomes another source of difficulty, yet she enjoys making objects whose purpose is to produce light. Jiang describes this less as a conscious declaration by the character than as an unconscious orientation: despite the film's prolonged darkness, some part of Ellie is still reaching toward illumination .

One camera, one lens, no tripod

The most radical formal restriction in So Far and From Now On is also one of its least conspicuous .

Jiang photographed the entire feature on a Canon C70 using a single 35mm Carl Zeiss Jena lens . He used no tripod, gimbal or Steadicam and avoided digital stabilization .

The intention was not to create constant visible instability.

Instead, Jiang treated handheld photography as a spectrum .

In an early caf� sequence, Ellie meets a friend soon after leaving prison . The shot appears nearly static, but Jiang wanted the frame to contain an almost imperceptible bodily uneasiness . He rested his elbow on the counter and placed several folded towels underneath it, reducing larger movements while allowing minute vibrations from his own breathing to remain in the image.

�The camera is still, but it isn't dead,� Jiang says. �She is trying to behave normally, but she is holding something inside her. I wanted the frame to have the smallest amount of that breath.�

At the opposite end of the film's emotional range comes a late sequence in which Ellie runs .

Before photographing it, Jiang ran the route repeatedly with Campos until his own breathing and balance began to resemble the physical exhaustion he wanted to express. During the take he tightened his arms to resist excessive shaking even as his fatigued body destabilized the camera . Lights from cars and storefronts stretched through the background while the camera struggled to retain control.

The technique reflects Jiang's larger philosophy as a Director of Photography: camera movement should not simply describe action but respond to the internal mechanics of a person .

He calls the broader approach hyper-realism�a term he uses for naturalistic work in which small realities are intensified until an otherwise invisible psychological experience becomes perceptible .

Lighting as emotional geography

Jiang's work as both Director and Director of Photography also allowed light to evolve continuously with performance and blocking.

One sequence follows Ellie's former boyfriend as he gradually enters her space, triggering the fear associated with their relationship.

The movement begins outside under lateral street light. Ellie then moves into an elevator, where illumination falls from overhead. By the time they reach the apartment, multiple bulbs are already glowing near the floor because she had been testing lamps before leaving earlier that day. When the characters finally sit, the visual logic has transformed into underlighting.

The progression was designed to remain plausible within each environment while allowing the emotional quality of the light to become increasingly uncomfortable .

Rather than treating lighting as a separate layer placed on top of the scene, Jiang used the geography of the practical sources to chart a change in psychological pressure .

Performance before coverage

The film's naturalism was equally dependent on its actors .

Jiang and Campos spent months developing the project before principal photography. Rather than beginning rehearsals by repeatedly running scripted scenes, Jiang created individualized character questionnaires .

Actors were asked to respond to one another in character about seemingly ordinary matters: childhood idols, habits, cars, private histories and other details that might never appear directly in the screenplay.

Certain pieces of information were deliberately withheld from one performer and privately given to another. The objective was to create asymmetry�allowing a genuine surprise or hesitation to enter an otherwise prepared dramatic situation .

That method became especially important in a late scene between Ellie and Jesse, her former partner.

Their relationship contains both love and damage, and the scene required contradictory emotional signals: Ellie's body resists him, her voice still carries care, while anger and exhaustion increasingly break through her restraint.

Jiang did not attempt to reach the final performance immediately.

Across roughly eleven takes, the actors moved progressively away from strict dependence on the written dialogue. Jiang preserved a few essential narrative points while opening larger areas for improvisation, at times giving individual notes privately so that one performer's next choice
could genuinely surprise the other.

Gradually, the emotional defenses of both performers weakened.

By the later takes, their personal emotional responses and the history of the characters had begun to overlap.

�My first responsibility was to make them feel completely safe,� Jiang says. �I didn't want them thinking about pressure or whether we were running out of time. If something felt truthful, I wanted them to have space to follow it.�

Jiang extended that philosophy with an unusual additional take after dialogue scenes . Once actors had performed the scripted and improvised versions, he sometimes asked them to repeat the entire dramatic progression without speaking.

The resulting MOS take required performers to communicate through gaze, movement, breath and interaction with the environment. In editing, those silent behaviors could replace dialogue when a gesture carried more emotional information than the written line .

Designing discomfort in the edit

That material eventually passed to editor Masha Ivanskaia, one of several collaborators Jiang identifies as central to the finished feature .

Their editing discussions extended beyond continuity and narrative clarity into literature, symbolism and the philosophical function of cutting.

Jiang describes one shared principle as emphasizing �emotional actions rather than the emotion of actions.�

In practice, that meant resisting the assumption that a scene should always cut at the most spatially seamless or conventionally comfortable moment. If Ellie's internal state called for a hesitation, interruption or mild rupture, the edit could preserve that discomfort.

The film's grammar therefore remained tied to the same protagonist-centered principle governing its photography.

Jiang also credits First Assistant Director Molly Youngstrom with navigating some of the
production's most complicated shooting days, including a day involving three locations and repeated schedule changes. Producer Kaylin Marie Stanford worked closely with Jiang on the film's demanding schedule, which had to accommodate location access, daylight, actor availability and a mid-film hair-color change that divided nearly one hundred scenes into difficult continuity blocks.

Campos, meanwhile, was involved well before photography began, traveling repeatedly between Orange County and Los Angeles for day-long development, casting and production meetings.

That trust became essential once production asked her to inhabit Ellie's emotional confinement at close range.

�The kind of performance I wanted would have been impossible without trust,� Jiang says. �Dominique gave the project an enormous amount before we ever turned on the camera .�

An independent film moving outward

So Far and From Now On was produced on an independent scale, without the backing of major-studio crews or large budgets. Even so, it has earned tangible critical acclaim and awards recognition on the international festival circuit. The film held its world premiere at the June 2026 Philadelphia Latino Arts & Film Festival as part of the official feature-film lineup. It went on to compete at Mexico�s FICTLAX and the Kookai International Film Festival, winning back-to-back top honors: Best International Feature and Best Narrative Feature. This recognition stems not from popular fanfare, but from the industry�s professional embrace of the film�s distinctive visual language and humanistic vision, bringing Shan Jiang�s auteur-driven filmmaking to wider attention within global independent cinema.

Jiang�s creative trajectory has not been one of overnight success. He began with drawing and animation before deepening his practice in production design, gradually evolving into a multi-hyphenate creator working as director and director of photography. As production designer on Neither Donkey nor Horse, he contributed to the period film that received the Narrative Bronze Medal at the 2024 Student Academy Awards, an achievement officially documented by the Academy; the University of Southern California also archives his production-design credits. So Far and From Now On marks his first narrative feature in the true sense: a full realization of his personal artistic vision forged through years of cross-disciplinary practice. As screenwriter, he constructs the protagonist�s nuanced inner logic; as director, he shapes restrained, layered performances from his cast; as director of photography, he externalizes emotion through grounded handheld cinematography. Every component--production design, practical lighting and editing--is unified in service of the character�s psychological state.

The result is a film built not around a spectacular transformation, but around the possibility that a very small action can separate one life into two periods.

�So far� is everything a person has carried.

�From now on� begins when that person finally decides to move .