Duke MFA Student Lei He Wins Academy Award for Experimental Film

Lei He, a student in Duke’s Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts program, has won the Alternative/Experimental category in the 53rd Student Academy Awards for her film, “Drifting.”

Born in 1994 and raised along the banks of China’s Yellow River, Lei developed an early awareness of social realities and marginalized communities. Once an aspiring investigative journalist, she has spent the past eight years making documentary films about coal miners, deep-sea fishermen, and women resisting domestic violence. 

Her work combines observational filmmaking with visual experimentation, including symbolic imagery, movement and hybrid forms. With “Drifting,” she turns her camera toward the coal-mining region where she grew up, creating a silent, black-and-white meditation on labor, memory, dignity and time. 

“I was honestly very surprised,” she said of learning that the film had won. “When I made ‘Drifting,’ I didn’t have any expectations for how far the film might go. I was simply trying to explore the boundaries of my own filmmaking and, at the same time, use the film as a way to pay tribute to my father’s generation.” 

The film advanced from 15 student semifinalists to seven finalists before receiving the award. Lei was in China when she learned that “Drifting” had become a finalist. She said the news left her so excited that she could barely sleep. The film is now eligible for consideration at the 99th Academy Awards in March 2027.  

“Drifting” follows a coal miner whose physical life underground intersects with dreams and imagined spaces. Through the miner’s body, Lei explores the relationship between geological time and human time: Coal takes millions of years to form, while a worker’s life is brief and vulnerable. 

“I wanted to create a dialogue between the human body and the deep time of the earth,” she said. “I wanted to explore what happens when these very different scales of time meet through the body of a worker.” 

The film was inspired by her childhood memories of a landscape covered in coal dust. She recalls black streets, houses, leaves and rivers, as well as the coal trucks and workers who shaped her early life. Several members of her family, including her grandfather, died of cancer. 

Although the film depicts difficult circumstances, Lei resisted representing miners only through poverty or hardship. Instead, she sought beauty and transcendence in their bodies and surroundings. The miner moves through the mine, the Yellow River, a village and dreamlike landscapes, searching for dignity and freedom beyond the limits of his reality. 

The film’s formal choices reinforce those themes. It contains no dialogue, relying on image, sound, rhythm and the body to communicate. Real miners appear in working environments, while scenes filmed in Lei’s grandparents’ house and village blur documentary reality with fiction. A stopped clock in the house, preserved exactly as Lei found it, became a symbol of time frozen by memory and loss. 

“Sometimes reality gives you something more powerful than anything you could imagine,” she said. 

She credits Duke’s Documentary Arts program with fundamentally reshaping how she thinks about filmmaking. Through its experimental approach, mentorship and creative community, the program gave her the confidence to move beyond traditional documentary conventions.  

“The idea for ‘Drifting’ had been somewhere in my mind for many years,” she said. “My first semester at Duke challenged my previous ideas about cinema, documentary, and art, and gave me the confidence to approach this very personal story in a completely different way. Duke gave me the space and the courage to finally turn the idea waiting inside me into a film.” 

She lists all the faculty who guided her along the way, not only helping her complete “Drifting,” but transforming how she understands herself as an artist. 

One of these faculty was her mentor, Research Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies Pedro Lasch. “His knowledge and vision feel almost like an ocean to me,” Lei said. “After our conversations, I often think, ‘I didn’t know research could be done this way,’ or ‘I didn’t know I could train myself as an artist in this way.’ Pedro helped me understand that artistic practice can itself be a way of thinking and doing research.” 

Lei is now developing projects about Buddhist statue production, a sex doll factory and unfinished buildings in China. Across those projects, she continues to examine labor, the body, landscape, and the social systems that shape individual lives. 

Lasch said it’s been an honor to support Lei during the early stages of what he knows will be a long and influential career in the arts. “Every project she develops is poetic, socially relevant, and aesthetically powerful,” he said. “Deeply rooted and global in scope, her art’s impact will only continue to grow, and I’m excited to watch it unfold.”