Filmmaker Naveen Chaubal grew up making movies. "For school projects, I would always try and sneak and maybe doing a video instead of writing a paper," he says.

But it wasn't until college that he realized it could be more than a way to get out of writing papers. "I didn't even know film schools existed," Naveen says. "I had no idea that it was something that you studied. It just wasn't in the realm of possibility."

He talks to host Dan Wu about his work, and they discover some of the parallels between art school and culinary school (the main curriculum is mostly European and the classes about Asian work are electives).

His short film, "Pinball," is a modern folk story centered around an immigrant teenager who wants to participate in a school bus race at his local speedway. It's a fish-out of-water-tale that was inspired by all the time Naveen spent riding buses when he lived in Los Angeles.

Naveen also worked on a documentary about Eric Garner's family for AJ+. He says films like that challenge him in different ways — as a filmmaker and as a person.

"It's so hard, especially when people are recounting stories of such pain," he says. "You just want to like, put your hand on their shoulder and be a little bit more human. I'll try and kind of nod to them and like, understand that I am not hiding behind this camera. I do hear you."