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UCLA’s film school allows its filmmakers to tell whatever stories they like, and more often than not, this leads to personal filmmaking.

In the case of UCLA alumna Vivian Umino, her short film “Ill Repair” is actually about two older men, but maintains that it’s still about her. The men are second-generation Japanese-Americans, also known as Nisei, like Umino’s father, and they are quibbling over a watch one of them, a watchsmith, has failed to fix.

“I was always fascinated and befuddled at the psychology of the Nisei man, and how they communicate without communicating. To this day, there’s certain things my father did I’ll never understand. This film captures one of those moments,” Umino said. “Film is a way of exploring what you don’t understand.”

Both Umino’s and current UCLA graduate student Juli Kang’s film, “The Liberation of Everyday Life,” were screened last Wednesday as part of this year’s Visual Communications Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival.

The theme behind the six-film screening was “Behind Closed Doors” and its inclusion of only female Asian American filmmakers hoped to shed light on their unique visions.

Umino struggled with portraying the history behind the men.

“People who know about Japanese-American history, internment and no-no boys wouldn’t need any of those markers in,” Umino said. “I made the decision to put more explanation in because I didn’t want to lose half my audience.”

Umino’s film features mostly subtext, unspoken feelings which the actors navigate through the dialogue. Sab Shimono was one of them, a professional actor whose work had been featured in “The Big Hit” and “Waterworld.” Umino said she was able to secure Shimono because of the complexity of the role, a scarcity among Asian American actors that films like hers and UCLA alumnus Justin Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow” hope to change.

“(Shimono) is a seasoned professional actor as good as any of the best actors, but because he’s Asian there’s a huge limit to the roles that he gets,” Umino said.

“I definitely think there are more opportunities. When I was starting out, there were no roles for Asians. Zippo.”

In Kang’s film, a woman attempts to reprogram herself to do battle with corporate America and her own sense of powerlessness.

It’s a surreal spectacle with dream sequences in a sun-drenched forest and a guru-like man (played by a UCLA professor) who meets the woman accidentally on street corners trying to reaffirm her leftist mantras. Kang made the film out of a similar sense of trying to balance making a living with maintaining ideals.

“When I first started film school, I thought I was going to make Asian American films and be an activist and say something about the world and the human condition but it’s so hard just to tell a basic story,” Kang said. “I think I made this film out of frustration of that.”

But as with Umino, Kang’s character does not deal with Asian- Americanness full on, but only as a secondary consequence of who she is. The woman is a disgruntled secretary whose obedience to the boss masks the swallowed angst underneath.

“A lot of Asian American women have that submissive quality, that they’re supposed to be a certain way,” Kang said. “I definitely struggle with that.”

Both Kang and Umino’s films were made as part of the UCLA film school program. Umino actually made “Ill Repair” in her first year of graduate work, while Kang’s film was her latest. Umino is now working on a feature film script as well as editing for UCLA documentarian Marina Goldovskaya’s new film.

Kang, meanwhile, is working on a documentary about her father’s grocery store, a reflection of her documentary roots assisting filmmaker Renee Tajima-Pena.

But no matter where their careers lead, they will always come back to who they are and where they came from.

“I can’t quite divide my art from who I am,” Umino said.