It’s testament to her grace: though her stories are profoundly personal (and never stripped of this quality for the sake of universalism), with the force of her gentle hand, they become mediums through which viewers might emphasize and, sometimes, relate. Her first film, Chopping Onions, featured her own grandmother and depicted the language and cultural barriers encountered by first-generation American children and their relatives—and the unexpected tenderness in the spaces where they overlap (Dancyger is the daughter of immigrants from Poland and Korea).