Director Wu Tsang’s new magical-realist drama, Wildness, is his first movie but the film—about the Silver Platter, an immigrant gay bar near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.—is already drawing critical buzz.

Wildness is semi-autobiographical—Tsang hosted a party by the same name in L.A.—but it definitely veers into surreal territory. (The bar itself is a character.)

Says Tsang:

“At its core, Wildness is a love story between me and a special place: a bar called the Silver Platter on the east side of Los Angeles. Our characters are more or less conventional archetypes; while everything else about the story is not.

I’m a young, idealistic queer person who arrives to the bar in search of something, I don’t know what. The bar is an elder/parental figure, who takes me in and looks after me, but also loses patience and teaches me some hard lessons when I make mistakes.

An experimental artist by trade, Tsang has more than one creative iron in the fire: He’s also contributing pieces to the Whitney Biennial, the New Museum’s Ungovernables Triennial and MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight.  He’s also working on a short film, “For How We Perceived a Life (Take 3,”‘ which he calls ” a performative investigation of Paris Is Burning.”

Photos via Wu Tsang