The Shuttle was made as Lu Han’s thesis film for her MFA degree. Set almost entirely between small worlds of a nail salon and a shuttle van, it provides a window into a life of an immigrant Asian woman and her fractured marriage. The Shuttle is about love, womanhood and independence.

Lu Han says: 'As a female Asian filmmaker, I constantly feel that we don’t see enough interesting Asian leading roles on the screen - especially females. When I started this project, I made the deliberate decision to focus my story on the emotional journey of an Asian woman.'

The stats can prove it - this movie is 90% Mandarin and Cantonese, with a 100% Asian, 80% female main cast, and a female dominated creative team.

'My mother got married and gave birth to me in her early twenties, and since then her roles as a mother and a wife chiefly defined her identity. Even today, women are often expected to marry and have children for society to term them “good women.” Many married and infertile women therefore suffer great distress because they cannot provide an offspring. Even though sterile men can be unfairly blamed, women disportionately bear the brunt for failure to procreate. Moreover, many women feel they cannot divorce due to social stigma, and remain in unhappy marriages, a notion especially prevalent amongst the women from low socioeconomic backgrounds. I’ve personally seen many women suffer from these problems, and it makes me all the more determined to be a voice for these women.

That’s why I explored issues of infertility, infidelity, and immobilization of women in this short film. In movies, the portrayal of the wife and mistress almost always follows the same line. The wife is the victim and the mistress is the devil. However, in relationships there is no absolute right or wrong. Often the wife, the mistress, even the husband can all be considered the victim in many regards. I want to explore these human relationships through a relatively unbiased lenses. All key characters have a reason or motivation for their action. Nobody is born pure evil or good; by moving the three characters along the spectrum closer mirrors the true state of humanity. When I write, I always weave social, political, and moral themes into the main narrative. My hope is to capture the unfolding stories of ordinary people; so the screen becomes a mirror or vessel to connect the dramas of their own lives lurking just below the surface. I believe good stories connect us all. I hope audiences will see themselves though the characters I created.'