Smoking Tigers

Sixteen-year-old Korean-American Hayoung comes face-to-face with the blinding harshness of impending adulthood as she balances the fallout from her parents’ divorce with an interest in a rebellious new set of friends far above her social standing. Winner of the U.S. Narrative Awards for Best Performance and Best Screenplay at Tribeca 2023.Hayoung dreams of a bigger house, one where her parents don’t fight anymore. While the family struggles to make ends meet, Hayoung looks after her younger sister, Ara, as they try to make sense of their parents’ new separation. Although Hayoung excels in school, her mother insists she enroll at the Miracle Learning Academy for the summer, a rigorous college prep program full of wealthy classmates on their way to the Ivy League. Keeping her low-income homelife a secret, Hayoung befriends her well-to-do peers to try her hand at teenage life, only to find herself torn between the life she wishes she had and the one she’s trying to hold together. SMOKING TIGERS, a soft, intimate narrative of a Korean American family learning to support each other the best way they know how, delves into the evolving relationships of parents and children through some of life’s biggest changes. –A.B. GUEST(S) IN ATTENDANCE