Nothing beats volunteering at a film festival as a photographer when you also gotta sit with the lovely audience for a film marathon that runs three consecutive days. I loved sinking into the darkness in theatre as much as jumping behind the scene to document - and volunteering at Alula gave me exactly that mix. Yet, being the only fully Chinese-language film festival in LA is not easy. Unlike those big established fests, Alula runs almost entirely on volunteer energy from earliest planning stages of film selection and coordination, to the final moments of execution on site. While I volunteered only for the duration of the three-day fest, what excited me the most was witnessing how the whole vision took shape. Apart from a few restored classics, the lineup was made up mostly of independent films by emerging directors in the Chinese-speaking world. They were bold and intimate, full of experimentation. Just like the volunteers I met there - young regardless of the actual age, and still experimenting with their own lives. We came across.