Robin Lung discovered the long-lost movie Kukan in 2009, when she began researching the life of Li Ling-Ai for a documentary.

Lung, a fourth-generation Chinese-American from Hawaii, is a graduate of Stanford University and Hunter College in New York, and has made two documentaries about strong females from the island state - Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last Queen, and Patsy Mink, a Japanese-American congresswoman during the 1970s.

For her third feature, Ling planned to make a documentary about Li, another strong woman from Hawaii, and one who shared her Sino-US background.