Connectivity: Riceboy Sleeps

Riceboy Sleeps (2022) is a tender and deeply personal work written, produced, edited, and directed by Anthony Shim. The film traces the bond between a Korean single mother and her son as they build a life in the suburbs of Canada in the 1990s. Drawing in part on Shim’s own childhood, the film follows So-young (Choi Seung-yoon) and the young Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang, Ethan Hwang) , whose hopes for a better future are tempered by the racial and cultural challenges that confront them. As Dong-hyun grows into adolescence, he becomes increasingly curious about his Korean heritage and in particular, about his deceased father. So-young is focused on building her new life, which now includes a relationship with a kind Korean-Canadian man (Anthony Shim) who is eager to take on the role of Dong-hyun’s surrogate father. Sudden devastating news prompts mother and son to return to South Korea for the first time since their initial departure, in hopes of reconnecting to their roots and reconciling their tragic past. Anchored by delicate performances and graceful long takes, Riceboy Sleeps is a moving portrait of diasporic working-class identity and the connections between parents and children. Filmmaker Anthony Shim joined moderator Miguel Penabella (Carsey-Wolf Center, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Riceboy Sleeps. This event was presented in conjunction with the UCSB Reads program. The program’s 2026 selection is Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. For more information and tickets to attend Zauner’s free public lecture at Campbell Hall on Thursday, May 7 at 7:30 PM, please visit this page. Anthony Shim was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to Vancouver, Canada with his family in the early 1990s. Anthony first discovered his passion for storytelling in high school drama class and pursued a career in acting. He has appeared in dozens of film, TV, theatre, and voiceover projects over the course of twenty years. Anthony co-founded and served as the artistic director of Blind Pig Theatre and later co-founded and co-curated Railtown Lab, an initiative designed to support the development of original theatre works. During that time, Anthony worked as an acting instructor at the esteemed Railtown Actors Studio as well as teaching the graduate program at the Vancouver Acting School. In 2019, Anthony completed his first feature film, Daughter, which he wrote, directed, produced and edited. His sophomore film, Riceboy Sleeps, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, where it won the Platform Prize. The film had its international premiere at the Busan International Film Festival, where it received the Flash Forward Audience Award. Anthony currently divides his time between Seoul and Vancouver working on his upcoming feature film projects. Miguel Penabella is Assistant Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines conspiracy, spectrality, and melancholia as theoretical frameworks for examining historical revisionism in the Philippines and the links between former presidents Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte. He is also interested in theorizations of cinematic temporality and slowness. He is a former coordinating editor of Media Fields Journal. This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center, and presented in conjunction with the 2026 UCSB Reads Program. The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-26 feature series Connectivity examines the evolving meaning of connection in our contemporary moment. While the term “connectivity” often invokes our ever-increasing entanglement with digital infrastructure and social media networks, this series reimagines the term not only as a technical feature of media, but as a humanistic value and a condition of social and public life. This series embraces connectivity as a framework for thinking critically about the ways in which people use media to connect with ideas and with one another, from the shared experience of moviegoing to the collective bonds forged through storytelling and public dialogue. Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms. Media are global by nature; they express culture just as much as they transcend borders. The CWC Global series is dedicated to showcasing media from around the world. This series features screenings and events that place UCSB in conversation with international media makers and global contexts across our deeply connected world.