Bong-Cha is an 45-year old Korean woman with a hidden past, a dead-end job, and she's two months' late on rent for her ultra crappy, black mold infested apartment run by a pervy Eastern European landlord. When Bong-Cha shows up to work at the Sunshine Studios TV station in Tulsa Oklahoma, the last thing she expects to see a giant, human-sized cockroach. But that's exactly what happens. In the ensuing encounter, she is knocked out.
Waking up in the janitor closet, Bong-Cha believes she's just had a terrible nightmare, but the weirdness is just beginning as she encounters a severed human finger in the ceiling and later, learns there are several other giant cockroaches after her. She is forced to take a late-night editor named Candace captive when the editor sees her obliterate what the editor thinks is a human being, but Bong-Cha knows is really a human-sized cockroach.
But the law catches up to Bong-Cha and Candace, and they are taken to a hospital for evaluation, where a doctor informs them that exposure to the black mold has given them hallucinations. Bong-Cha manages to effect a dramatic escape and goes on the run to find the truth about the growing cockroach infestation in Tulsa, but discovers the truth may not be easy to uncover. Her list of human allies shrinks as she is consumed with finding the mysterious Patient X, who may hold the secret to a conspiracy colonizing Tulsa.
Is Bong-Cha really crazy, or is she seeing the truth for the first time? BLACK MOLD is THEY LIVE meets MIMIC, with a bold stylish look at the world through the eyes of an unlikely heroine.
Second Rounder, Austin Film Festival, 2020