Difficult times, past and present

Tze Chun looks at his new film and the indie industry

Tze Chun is at Sundance screening ''Children of Invention,'' which features Boston-area scenes.

PARK CITY, Utah - It has been a Sundance tradition for a quarter century now: Take unpleasant memories from one's formative years, mulch them into a feature film, and watch audiences applaud and Hollywood take notice. For Boston-area native and rising director Tze Chun, it's playing out as scripted.

Chun, 28, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based painter and filmmaker who was raised in Randolph, returned to Boston last summer to shoot "Children of Invention," a low-budget drama grounded in childhood experiences of watching his immigrant mother struggle to get ahead. Now he has returned to Sundance, where his short "Windowbreaker" - like the new feature, filmed in the Hub - broke through in 2007. In the intervening months, Filmmaker Magazine has named Chun one of "25 Young Filmmakers to Watch."

"Children of Invention" isn't one of the flashier Sundance entries. Instead, the film is a somber, deeply felt drama about two young children (played by 11-year-old Michael Chen and 8-year-old Crystal Chiu) who look on helplessly as their single mom, Elaine (Cindy Cheung), enrolls in one network-sales pyramid scheme after another, lured by the promised prospect of quick riches. It's a tale of a surreptitious childhood lived in cars, half-finished condos, and at "sales meeting" seminars; at one point, after Elaine is arrested, her son and daughter are forced onto the streets to survive.

"Children of Invention" is fiction, and Chun, interviewed at Sundance after the first screening of his film, is quick to point out that his own mother never abandoned him and his younger sister. But, he says, "the world of the film is one that I did grow up in. It was a world where we always felt one step behind and we were trying to make that leap to be in a place where we didn't feel like we owed money. We went to dozens and dozens and dozens of these seminars. I don't think I've ever seen that type of desperation on people's faces [elsewhere]. I hope I never see it again."

Skin cream, shampoos, miracle products to sell - the basement was always filled with samples. The family usually got out of a venture before they lost money, but not always, by Chun's account.

Without being didactic about it, "Children of Invention" says this is an all-too common part of the immigrant experience - the fraudulent underbelly of the American Dream, baited for naive newcomers. Responding to a question after the screening, Chun said, "Ponzi schemes are endemic in minority populations. A lot of the seminars we'd go to, there'd be hundreds of desperate working class families and a lot of them were minority families - the people who had the most to lose."

The film was produced out of New York, with help from Chun's filmmaker friends - Newton-raised Anna Boden, codirector of "Half Nelson" (for which Chun painted the poster), served as editor on "Children" - but all the exterior scenes were filmed in Randolph and Boston. Chun's childhood home served as the house the family gets evicted from in the movie, and the Red Line, the Southeast Expressway gas tanks, and Downtown Crossing all make appearances.

"I always wanted to shoot in Boston," says the director, "because there are so many movies that take place in New York, and I felt that the suburban area outside of Boston is such a - to me, it's photogenic. Some people might not think that. In some ways, because I spent all my formative years there, I am a regional filmmaker."

Chun's childhood was divided into two worlds. At the age of 5 he tested into Milton Academy, received a financial aid package, and was a day student at the school through his senior year, after which he went to Columbia University. It was at Milton that he discovered film. "They had an editing bay in the A/V department, just a little tape-to-tape Super VHS. As soon as I started playing around with the camera, it was like this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. It got to the point where I would edit all night and building security would come in, and I'd have to call my mom at 3 in the morning and have her drive over from Randolph to pick me up."

"Children of Invention" comes to Sundance at a critical juncture in the film business. Distributors are shuttering, deals aren't getting done, and the whole indie landscape is feeling the squeeze. Chun feels the downturn has an upside in forcing filmmakers to seek online and other outlets. He admires director Wayne Wang's nerve in releasing "The Princess of Nebraska" exclusively to YouTube last year and even ventures to say, "I'm glad the independent film industry kind of broke this year, so that there can be some other distribution model that can work for the next 20 years. I don't think that there's anything that's off the table."

Perhaps, but he'd still like to sell "Children," which was received extremely well by Sundance audiences but hasn't received any offers as yet. For now, Chun's just happy to be in Park City along with his younger sister, Tze-ching Chun, and their mother, Ai Cheng. He's adapting the latter's early experiences into his next film: Cheng was sold to and raised in a Singapore brothel before escaping at a young age to Hong Kong and then America.

She now works as a personal trainer, in her son's words "teaching Chinese ladies how to be healthy and eat right and bench 250. She's a lot stronger than me." But anyone who sees "Children of Invention" knows that.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.