A Vietnamese American ghost story just won a $100,000 film prize
Julian Doan's Long's Long Lost & Mini Mart won Ripcord's $100,000 top prize on October 30. The short is a Little Saigon ghost story about grief inside an immigrant convenience store.
The Goldscene Desk
Julian Doan's Long's Long Lost & Mini Mart won the $100,000 first prize at Ripcord's first Halloween Film Festival on October 30. Ripcord says that is the largest cash award a short film festival has ever paid out. The short, just under 18 minutes, played the night before at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood with twelve other finalists.
Doan is a Vietnamese American writer-director in Los Angeles. The film is set in the back of a Little Saigon convenience store, where a young customer pays to bring his dead father back for one last talk. Jackie Tran plays the customer. Hồng Đào plays the clerk. She is a Vietnamese American actress and comedian with a long career in Vietnamese variety and film. Netflix's Beef was her English-language debut, and she later starred in the Vietnam-Korea drama Leaving Mom. In Doan's short she is the one who has to clean up after the reunion goes wrong.
The store sells liquor, lotto tickets, and, in the back, a chance to speak with the dead. The customer rehearses what he will say. The conversation does not go the way he planned. The clerk has her own grief, quieter and older, and the film stays with both of them under the fluorescent lights.
Doan made the short in Season 5 of Indeed and Hillman Grad's Rising Voices program, produced with 271 Films. Ten directors each got a budget to make a film about the future of work. Doan's premiered at Tribeca in June 2025, then won best short and the audience award at Viet Film Fest later that year. In April it took the Grand Jury Prize at Nitehawk Shorts in Brooklyn. His earlier short, Raspberry, opened at Sundance in 2021. He is developing a feature called Half Sweet, the third film in what he calls an unofficial dead-dad trilogy.
Ripcord, founded by Charlie Cleveland, streamed 50 genre shorts for free and let fans vote before the Hollywood night. Voting was close enough that the finals grew to thirteen films. The jury included Deadpool director Tim Miller, Fantastic Fest programmer Jean Lauer, and Sundance shorts programmer Lisa Ogdie. Sophia Parella's Zippy's House took second place and $50,000. Carl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky's Harold Eats Maude took third and $25,000.
Cleveland said the top prize is meant to fund a filmmaker's next chapter. Doan already has one in the works.
