Fahad Ahmed
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Devin Fei-Fan Tau is a Portland documentary filmmaker who makes films about silenced stories, from Japanese American incarceration in Sansei Sensibility to the lives history tried to erase. Intimate, interview-driven work about silence, resilience, and what gets carried forward.
Devin Fei-Fan Tau came to film on his third career, and built it around the stories he was once told to keep quiet.
In 1975, a plane from Taiwan touched down at LAX and an eight-year-old stepped out into a country that did not yet have room for everything he was. "When our plane from Taiwan touched down at LAX in 1975, my mother, my father, my two older brothers and I stepped into the hot, dry sunshine of a new and, to us, very foreign world," he wrote, decades later. It took him most of those decades to put what happened next on a screen.
Devin Fei-Fan Tau is a filmmaker in Portland, Oregon, and the founder of No Sunrise Wasted. He did not start there. He built a career in corporate finance, then another in apparel merchandising, before he picked up the thing that would hold all of it together. The films he makes now are about the silence he knew firsthand, the kind imposed by a native culture and an adopted one at the same time.
The thread that runs through the work
"For decades, I balanced conflicting desires to be both strong and true to myself, to be independent and connected, to be Asian and American," he has written. His films keep returning to the people caught in that same pull.
His documentary Who's on Top?, narrated by George Takei, follows four queer athletes up Mount Hood. He has called it "a story emblematic of anyone anywhere who has overcome judgment and criticism from both their families and society at large to become fully themselves." He made the leap to narrative with Half Sisters, a thriller shot at a farmhouse in Silverton, Oregon, about two estranged sisters circling an inheritance, and The Road Home, a documentary on the prison system that was a finalist for the 2023 Media for a Just Society Award.
No Sunrise Wasted, the company he founded in 2016, is the engine under all of it: a small Portland shop that works from ideation to final delivery across documentary, narrative, and corporate work. The name is also the mantra. "The mission of my company, No Sunrise Wasted, is to bring to the screen narratives that compel audiences to think, feel, and become engaged in stories that have long been silenced," he has said.
The film on the bench now
His current project is Sansei Sensibility, a feature documentary that follows three Sansei, third-generation Japanese Americans, in Ontario, Oregon, and traces the long shadow of Japanese American incarceration through their lives. It is the kind of film he is built for: intimate, interview-driven, about silence and resilience and what gets carried forward. In 2026 it was awarded a Portland Post-Production Grant, his second, which means the story is now in the room where documentaries are actually won or lost, the edit.
What he is really after
Underneath the subjects, the silence, the awards, the grant, there is a simpler thing driving him. "My drug is really seeing people's eyes light up when the camera is rolling." The films change shape, documentary to thriller to documentary again, but that is the constant: someone finally being seen, on a screen, in a country that took a while to make room. "To reconcile being an American and being an immigrant doesn't mean choosing between one or the other," he has written. His whole body of work is the proof.
About
Devin Fei-Fan Tau is a Taiwanese American filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon, and the founder of No Sunrise Wasted (founded 2016), a boutique production company working across documentary, narrative, and corporate film. His work includes the documentary Who's on Top? (narrated by George Takei), the thriller Half Sisters, and the documentary The Road Home (finalist, 2023 Media for a Just Society Award). His feature documentary Sansei Sensibility is in post-production, supported by a 2026 Portland Post-Production Grant.