VA-MEGN THOJ was awarded a grant for the documentary/narrative Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong Hunter Killings, concerning the erasure of race in the media coverage of the case of the Wisconsin Hmong hunter killings, illuminating the active and ongoing occulting, or masking, of race in Hmong-white relations. The film is based on a conversation between Va-Megn Thoj and anthropologist Louisa Schein, published in American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association. The subject of the conversation was the 2004 killing of six white hunters by Chai Soua Vang in Wisconsin. The video work will feature elements of the real life conversation between Thoj and Schein while interweaving fictional elements extracted from a screenplay written by Thoj called Die by Night, which portrays the terror of a group of Hmong campers who are methodically hunted and maimed by what they think is a Hmong demon from Laos. Daybreak, however, reveals to the sole survivor that it is white hunters in ski masks who have ruthlessly murdered the party over one long night. This dark story inadvertently suggests that Chai Soua Vang, vastly outnumbered by eight hostile white hunters, perceived a similar threat to his life and could see no other response than the violent one he embraced. His intent is a sustained critique of the hunting incident and the media coverage of it to provoke needed dialogue about race relations.