‘Cherry-Colored Funk’ Is a Surreal Ride Through Identity, Capitalism and Chaos

Mixed Asian Media - December 2, 2025

By Angela Wong Carbone

Bombastic is the operative word to describe the filmmaking team of Chelsie Pennello and Corbett Blair’s latest film, Cherry-Colored Funk. Starring Michael Tow as a frenzied entrepreneur and Laura Hetherington as his disaffected employee, the film is packed with punchy visuals, brooding themes and a surreal soundtrack. Following their Five Filmmakers to Watch conversation, MAM’s Angela Wong Carbone sat down with the duo to celebrate their new film.

Cherry-Colored Funk has dark night-of-the-soul energy. An almost neon energy. There's a fun soundtrack. Can you talk a little bit more about how you came from Mandarins to this project?

Chelsie: We are pretty slow, I think, as filmmakers compared to others. We always take a year minimum to finish things. Once we'd finished Mandarins, we'd lived in that world for so long. So the origins of Cherry-Colored Funk were wanting to do something completely different.

Corbett: We were really interested in trying to do something that would stand out among that [festival] landscape and go not only louder and faster-paced but also have an aesthetic that we thought would be different. For 16 minutes, you could put the audience through something unique and novel and lend Cherry-Colored Funk’s energy without overstaying its welcome.

Did you have any references for the film? What was on your mood board for this project?

Chelsie: You're always borrowing when you're making things. Like a mashup. Obviously, the Safdie brothers, in terms of the anxiety of the piece. We took a lot of reference, in terms of shooting, from The Bear. In terms of comedy, we love the Coen brothers. We love how the comedy comes from characters who can't help but be themselves.

Corbett: It's a film of people who just can't connect with each other and are balls of different types of insecurities, which is something the Coen brothers do very successfully. At the end of the day, it's just a lot of people with problems trying to deal with them with their limited tool sets.

Chelsie: Infinite Jest, that's another one. We read it in 2020 in a book club with friends.

You definitely need all of the pandemic to get through that book, too.

Chelsie: Yeah! There is a character—Madame Psychosis—a mysterious radio DJ character who wears this veil over her face the whole time. There was one particular scene where she would chant random scientific words during her radio show. It felt very cinematic. All of Boston was covered in the city lights, and people were huddled with their headphones listening to her chant. I wanted to write something like that. So it started with the DJ.

I wouldn't have expected that the DJ was the first character.

Chelsie: Yeah, I know, ’cause Roberto is the movie.

Corbett: Perhaps Cormac McCarthy is also a bit of an influence. He died before we were writing the script. I had just read Blood Meridian. He was why we chose to have a very subtle Western undertone with both the music and Roberto as a cowboy figure, looking out to the land of Western capitalism and trying to stake his claim.

There is a theme in all the work: identity within this landscape of America and how to figure out your place in it. Is the American dream something you're consciously interested in making more films about?

Chelsie: The Tribeca shorts block we were in was framed around identity. I've never super consciously thought about identity. I've thought more about suffering. There's definitely an Americanness in there. This is just who we are. Our stories are definitely rooted in America.

Corbett: And the current social zeitgeist and what types of people are running the world, or who you want to be. Identity was on my mind. Roberto’s changing of his name and killing his old self is a significant symbolic gesture.

Corbett, you and your brother made the music for this film? What was that process like?

Corbett: I consider myself mainly a composer. I was really excited to do the soundtrack for this because I had an excuse for it to be as weird and as electronic and as high-energy as I could possibly want. The bulk of the soundtrack is this strange DJ set that Lily (Laura Hetherington) found somewhere deep online. We wanted it to feel like it was a strange DJ set comprised of a bunch of different genres from a bunch of different time periods, from all over the world. A good portion of composing was writing these little snippets. I would write something that was more EDM-based, and my brother would be working on something that sounded like 1980s Latin America. The ending piece sounds like an old Ennio Morricone score. It was a lot of fun.

Where can we find what you do next?

Chelsie: Our Instagram and website are Yumeji House Pictures. That's our production company.

Corbett: We've also released a full-length version of the soundtrack as an album on streaming platforms that they could check out as well.

Cherry-Colored Funk is available to stream on Omeleto!