Filmmaker Spotlight
Crystal Jin Kim
Threadbeat Dad
Director: Crystal Jin Kim
Country : USA
Runtime: 22:11
Genre: Comedy, Dark Comedy, Family Drama, Magical Realism
Language: English
Completion Year: 2025
Links: Instagram
Synopsis
An estranged hospice custodian fears the idea of an undignified death. He goes to bed in a suit every night in case he should die in his sleep, grows increasingly fashionable, and rockets into ludicrous fame.
About the Director
Crystal Jin Kim is an artist and independent filmmaker from Atlanta, Georgia. She is the 2023-2025 Filmmaker-in-Residence with the Atlanta Film Society and a 2020-2022 alumnus of The Creatives Project’s Artist-in-Studio residency program. Crystal received Asian Cultural Empowerment's inaugural Grant Award in 2021 and was nominated for the 2023 United States Artists Fellowship award in filmmaking. She is a 2023 Hambidge Center Fellow, a 2025 Oreum Residency Artist, and a 2025 selected independent filmmaker for Platform Busan at BIFF.
Crystal graduated from Northwestern University in 2014 with two Bachelor of Arts degrees, one in Radio/Television/Film and the other in Art Theory and Practice.
Her short films have screened at numerous film festivals in the U.S. and abroad. These include the Atlanta Film Festival, CAAMFest, Seoul International Youth Film Festival, Hollyshorts Film Festival, and more.
Director Statement
While “Threadbeat Dad” is a dark comedy with magical realism, all of the scenes, their motivations, and the characters are rooted in my relationship with my late father and how I view the world through his eyes and my own. This film is an exploration of how we can struggle to be vulnerable in our most difficult relationships and can get lost in how we present ourselves to the world. There are undercurrents of connection, depression, vulnerability, shame, conformity, and striving that I continue to peel back as I think about these characters.
I wrote this script several years ago when my father was still living, but I knew that I needed to grow as a filmmaker with other projects before attempting the scale of this one. We ended up producing the project after he unexpectedly passed, but I am thankful to still process parts of life through this work and connect with others who watch it as well.