Pa Na Lor
Qhia Dab Neeg Spotlight Filmmaker
The heart of filmmaking is just my experiences—our Hmong community, our Hmong social issues, and just things that I experienced, the things that I want to…let out. It’s the only medium that we can reach our parents with. And that’s the generation that we need to tell them…how they’re affecting us.
Pa Na Lor is a Hmong American multidisciplinary artist and experimental animator whose practice includes drawing, illustration, printmaking, textiles, design, and hand-drawn animation. She studied experimental animation at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she explored a wide range of approaches to visual storytelling. Lor’s films combine traditional and digital processes, incorporating hand-drawn animation, woodblock printing, handmade textures, and collage to create deeply personal and often symbolic narratives. Her film Crabapples draws from her childhood experiences and uses Hmong language and cultural forms to explore family relationships and intergenerational experience. Her ongoing work My Grandmother the Shaman draws upon family memory, spirituality, and an archival recording of her grandmother. Through her work, Lor brings personal experience and Hmong cultural life into experimental animation while exploring how art can communicate across generations.
Qhia Dab Neeg: 50 Years of Hmong Film in Minnesota has been financed in part with funds provided by the State of Minnesota through the Minnesota Historical Society from the Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund.