The world of genre movies can be an insular one, with low budgets and distribution difficulties that hinder even well-regarded projects. But what might seem like constraints to another filmmaker are for director Mattie Do a world of possibility. When Do, who is from Laos, premiered her horror movie *Dearest Sister *at Austin's Fantastic Fest in September, it was her home country's 13th film—not of 2016, but ever.

Laos has operated under a strict Communist government since the 1970s, and non-propaganda filmmaking only started there in the last decade. That makes Do, who was born in Los Angeles to Lao parents and moved to Vientiane in 2010, not just one of a small handful of filmmakers in the country, but the only horror director—and the only woman. She's responsible for two of the country's 13 features thus far, and already has plans for a third piece in her ongoing trilogy. (Where her debut, *Chanthaly, *addressed a Lao woman's place in family, and *Dearest Sister *explores a Lao woman in her society, the third film will examine Lao women in foreign society.)

"Everyone knows about Japanese film or about films from Korea and India, but who the hell has seen a Lao film? No one," Do says. "If you go research Laos, you find very little. And whatever you see is from the lens of some traveler who's only been there a week or two, someone who finds poverty charming. The portrayal Westerners have of my country is a sham, and that's why I wanted to portray it." After its Fantastic Fest debut, *Dearest Sister *has spread to festivals across the globe. It was selected as the opening-night feature for October's inaugural Brooklyn Horror Fest, and screenings have popped up in Europe, Asia, and South America.

The movie follows Ana and Nok, two cousins on opposite ends of Laos' class structure. When Ana starts to go blind, her husband sends for Nok, who leaves her family in rural poverty and goes to the city to care for Ana, hoping to earn some money for her struggling relatives in return. But as Ana's condition worsens, she seems to be having visions—and only Nok is around to interpret the numeric messages that will dramatically change their relationship.

While a genre like comedy doesn't necessarily resonate outside of the culture it was created within—Do has tried to show *Arrested Development *to non-Americans without success—Do found that horror was uniquely well-suited to translation. And when an audience can connect to Dearest Sister's plot, they're primed to pick up on its uniquely Lao cultural depictions. "They can understand it as a genre film, but they really start to see it as a snapshot of what's happening in modern day Lao," Do says. "Because genre is so universal, horror so thrilling, a lot of people will go and watch it. When they see there's social drama, they seem to think that's really cool, too."

As such, *Dearest Sister *shows viewers more about Laos than any documentarian or travel blogger ever has. Throughout its increasingly eerie slow burn, Do explores Lao family dynamics, class divides, gender politics, and superstition surrounding luck and death. But it's much more than a socio-academic exercise: It plays with your expectations, draws out the tension of its most suspenseful plot thread, and unleashes beautiful but horrifying sequences.

Mattie Do

Do doesn't possess any formal background in filmmaking; she used to work in ballet and makeup, though as a child in California she soaked up films with her dad that might not have been entirely age-approporiate (think *Terminator *before 10). Now, those influences are pushing their way out of her, even if the process is completely unbounded. "I'm making stories that are floating around in my head, in environments I'm around, but I have no context of what a story should or can be," she says.

This inexperience proves to be an advantage in Laos' work-in-progress film infrastructure, as Do improvises solutions where others might meet frustration. She enlists her screenwriter husband to help her put ideas onto the page. She's crowdfunded and worked with a Lao brewery to back her productions, within which a luxurious crew might be 10 people (major US films will have a bigger crew than that just to be camera operators). And throughout Do's filmmaking, she's used her home as a setting, cast her own dog in a role, and trained actors on-set. Seeing the results, you'd never guess *Dearest Sister *stems from such a non-traditional process.

Perhaps best of all—better than her budding career, better than her new kick-ass thriller, *maybe *even better than pushing Lao film forward—Do wants others to be able to follow her path. She's insisted on hiring interns at fair wages during her productions, even when finding such work in Laos period isn't always possible. And when her first film became a favorite of piracy site EZTV, Do decided to put the raw footage online in the public domain and allow other aspiring filmmakers to peek behind the curtain.

"I had no one teaching me besides my husband, I had no film school," she says. "You can't just knock on a filmmaker's door and say, 'Teach me,'" she says. "There are all these hopefuls out there that don't know what a film looks like behind the scenes, but if they have all the pieces, they can do what I did and blunder through it, too." The real horror here? If *Dearest Sister *is Do just blundering through, the final piece of her trilogy is going to be downright frightening.

Dearest Sister continues to screen at film festivals across the globe, with its most recent dates listed on its Facebook page. The film was recently added to Shudder, a streaming site for horror, in the UK.