Growing up, Jen Sungshine and David Ng never saw themselves represented on the big screen. So as founders and creative directors of Love Intersections, they focus on imagining a world where race and sexuality would never be a barrier to sharing their life experiences.

“How we started was really out of the frustration of our stories as queer people of colour not being shared,” Ng says in a conference call to the Georgia Straight. “Instead of waiting for our stories to be told, we try to tell our own stories.”

Love Intersections makes documentary films centred on unique narratives, and they often don’t conform to the ways queer people are routinely represented in mainstream media.

That’s why Sungshine and Ng say that creating them is so necessary and so personal.

“We’re offering different dimensions of queer people of colour, so it’s not rooted in drama porn,” Sungshine explains. “My parents are Buddhist, and when I came out to them, they were over the moon. I didn’t experience that narrative that a lot of western society would paint on Taiwanese people.”

Love Intersections likes to bend the rules any way it can. Their films often subvert traditional methods of documentary filmmaking.

“We don’t go in with a script,” Ng says. “We really collaborate with the person whose story we’re sharing so that they really help craft the production of their story.”

Collaboration is one of their biggest mandates—so much so that they end up building very real relationships with the people whose stories they capture and whose experiences and creative energies they become intimately familiar with.

“The stakes are quite high for us, emotionally and personally, because that’s what happens when you start fostering relationships,” Ng says.

“The emotions often get really real, and we have to make space for that,” Sungshine adds.

They believe that representation has come a long way in the past several years, but they remain as passionate about it as when they started. Sungshine says that doing this work and making these connections with the LGBTQ+ community makes her hopeful about the future of queer cinema.

“It’s such an incredible reminder that we all just want to feel less lonely, and we all want to be embraced by each other, and we all just want to be accepted as we are, as authentically as we can be.”