Growing up in Wellington, New Zealand, with parents from Italy and the Philippines, London-based filmmaker Dominique Lecchi describes her debut short film, Balsa Wood, as being inspired by her own experiences. “I was thinking about the experience of visiting my Filipino aunt and the community she’s a part of on the South Island of New Zealand,” says Lecchi. “The last time [I’d gone there] I’d come all the way from London, so it felt like a real odyssey back to childhood.”

Lecchi remembers as a child being captivated by ‘tinikling,’ a traditional Filipino dance that involves the tapping and sliding of bamboo sticks, and which the characters perform at the end of the film. “For people who grow up across any different cultures there's a challenge of working out how to fit in to your community without losing connection to your personal roots,” she says. “There's a lot of humor to be found in this experience, but it can be incredibly difficult as well.”

Drawn “to the onomatopoeia of the performance” of tinikling, the film’s title is a metaphor for Scotty, the teenage protagonist played by British Game of Thrones actor Jessica Henwick, who will star in the upcoming J.J. Abrams Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens. “If her family is all robust bamboo,” explains Lecchi, “she's the malleable balsa wood, still discovering her way to fit in.”

Ananda Pellerin is a London-based editor and writer.