Sorry to Bother You cost close to $5 million, and has lured in a wide swath of the moviegoing public—audiences of all colors and ages. Yang Bongiovi predicted this, and encouraged Riley and the financiers to choose a distributor who would understand it as well, rather than the bigger players courting the filmmakers, after the movie debuted to raucous reviews at Sundance 2018.

“Nina was the voice of reason,” said Riley. “She was steadfastly saying that she could tell that the bigger studios just saw this as a black film, and didn’t understand the place in cinema history that it could have. That was part of the reason to go with Annapurna.”

The producer, who changed her last name in 2012 when she married Jon Bon Jovi’s younger brother Anthony Bongiovi (who uses the traditional spelling of their family name), has a history of making bets on people and subject matters Hollywood normally wouldn’t touch.

“Nina’s willingness to give her knowledge over to anyone who is trying to develop movies, either with us or on their own—that’s a superpower, because it opens up more avenues for the things we are doing,” said Whitaker. “She’s happy to look past the current system and raise the funds necessary to move a project forward, and she has the aptitude to develop these projects and stand by these individuals who may have never done something of this scope before.”

Yang Bongiovi knows what it’s like to be an outsider, moving from Taiwan to East Los Angeles when she was five years old with her siblings and mother. Her father stayed in Taiwan to run a sweater manufacturing business, sending money home, hoping his children could have a better education than he did.

The second of four kids, she majored in journalism and political science at Cal State Fullerton, before heading to USC’s Annenberg School for Communication for a degree in entertainment management. In grad school, she started working as an analyst in the marketing department of Warner Bros., but quit after graduation to work as an assistant on her friend’s martial-art action films in Hong Kong. “My mom was like, ‘You’re crazy. Why are you leaving this really nice job at Warner Bros. to become an assistant on kung-fu movies?’” said Yang Bongiovi.

Despite her mother's resistance, Yang Bongiovi stayed for four years, learning everyone’s job on the set before venturing out on her own. She then raised $15 million from the Taiwanese government and began her career as an independent producer. What she hadn’t learned on her own, she gleaned from advisers like Joseph Cohen, a film-finance professor at U.S.C. Meanwhile, she made two low-budget features: Mail Order Wife and Confessions of an Action Star, the latter of which she classifies as slightly embarrassing. Then came tragedy: her mother and sister died a year apart from each other, both from different forms of respiratory disease. She ended her engagement. The money from Taiwan dried up.

Her eventual partnership with Whitaker solidified her path, and gave her the courage to invest in filmmakers with new voices for a marketplace that is interested in statement pieces about race and culture in America. “I’m also hyper-aware that I can find an audience and a market for it, because I still have to answer to our investors,” she said. “I believe in what Forest and I are doing and building. I believe that if you put your heart and attention into making the best movie, the financing will come.”

She is constantly meeting new filmmakers through her relationships with Annenberg, where she discovered Coogler, Cinereach, San Francisco Film Society, and Sundance. She mentors filmmakers each semester at U.S.C., and recently started a nonprofit with Pharrell Williams’s producing partner, Mimi Valdés, called Metta Collective, which aims to educate filmmakers of color through workshops, dinners, and other events. “One of my goals, being an Asian-American woman in this town, is to create solidarity [among filmmakers of color] and not be divided,” she said. “Most of these filmmakers don’t have the money to hire an attorney to guide them on deals. I say, ‘Call us. We’ll guide you on the deal, and we’ll tell you how much you are worth—and remind you how much you’re worth.’”