Only In This World

SHORT | 12:00

When an empty nester loses her ability to summon her daughter back from the afterlife, she is forced to find help from the person she resents the most: her ex-husband's mistress.

Director Biography - Dorothy Xiao

Dorothy Xiao is a Los Angeles based award-winning narrative film director and writer with a degree in Psychology from UCLA. A Chinese American daughter of immigrants, Dorothy creates grounded family dramas with a hint of fantasy, focusing on the complexities of vulnerable emotions like loneliness and grief. Dorothy has directed 13 short films and has worked on over 30 film and video projects with companies like CBS, HBO, and Disney. She is an Alliance of Women Directors - Directing the Actor Lab Fellow and winner of the 2023 CAPE Julia S. Gouw Short Film Challenge.

Dorothy’s films total over 600,000 views online and have screened at multiple film festivals such as the Nevada City Film Festival, DTLA Film Festival, and the Oscar-qualifying Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. She directed the award-winning short film COLORFUL MINDS for the 2022 CBS Leadership Pipeline Challenge, which won a donation of $75,000 from CBS to the nonprofit Painted Brain. Her short film DIVE BAR played on board Alaska Airlines. She is an alumnus of the Jubilee Media Fellowship, where she wrote and directed the short film EXPOSURE, which now lives on a Youtube channel with over 7 million subscribers.

Dorothy is an avid supporter of empowering underrepresented voices in media, and when not making films, Dorothy binge watches anime with her stuffed bunny Rabby, reads juicy romance novels, and drinks copious amounts of boba milk tea.