A Brighter Moon is the story of Mikey and Valentine, two students from Hong Kong who have come to Toronto to study English at a “visa school.” Mikey and Valentine find themselves in a strange land where they must struggle to survive in a world without parents. The film attempts to show the foreign students in a sympathetic light, pointing to some of the problems they face in Canada. The title refers to an Asian proverb that translated roughly means, “The moon shines brighter in a foreign country.” A Brighter Moon was filmed entirely in Toronto's Dundas Street Chinatown and presents its characters as real people without falling into the usual stereotypes of Asians seen in the West.