"All That We Love" is Yen Tan, Margaret Cho's film about "pet grief"

In 2013 filmmaker Yen Tan was devastated when his dog, Tanner, died in his arms. Tanner was the first pet adopted by Tan and his husband, Jerry Furman, and the loss had an unexpectedly profound impact. An emotionally reserved person, Tan suddenly found himself crying at the slightest provocation. “I was stunned by how hard that was for both Jerry and me,” he said recently from Malaysia, where he was visiting family. “The grief went on far longer than I thought it would.”

A lot has happened since Tan, 49, began writing “All That We Love,” the film inspired by Tanner’s death, which opens the Boston Asian American Film Festival Thursday at the Brattle Theatre. Tan and his husband adopted another dog, Tesla, who, like Tanner, died of cancer, about a month before preproduction in 2023. Then, the big one. Jerry died earlier this year at the age of 87. They had been together for 25 years. What started as a film about the death of a beloved pet had bled into real life, with grief spilling over from all directions.

“It’s as if I made a film that was about my past, my present, and my future,” Tan said.

That film, like most of Tan’s features (including “Pit Stop” and “1985″), is an uncommonly sensitive and disarmingly quiet drama about people at an inflection point, trying to figure out what comes next. Margaret Cho delivers a rare non-comedic performance as Emma, an Angeleno who, like Tan, is knocked sideways by the death of her dog (also named Tanner). Grief, as it is wont to do, ends up affecting all of her relationships.

She reassesses her estrangement from her ex-husband, Andy (Kenneth Choi), an actor and recovering alcoholic back on the scene after a long stay in Singapore. She feels abandoned by her daughter, Maggie (Alice Lee), set to decamp to Australia with her boyfriend. She also ruffles the feathers of her best friend, Stan (Jessie Tyler Ferguson), reeling from the death of his own partner and angry that Emma seems to be considering a reconciliation with her formerly negligent ex.

Writing with friend and longtime collaborator Clay Liford, Tan, who said he is “incredibly excited” to attend the festival, depicts grief as a sort of fulcrum, a hazy but somehow vivid area between a longed-for before and an uncertain after. Emotion is plentiful in “All That We Love,” which takes its title from a Helen Keller quote (“What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us”). But it’s never easy, or broad.

Tan initially imagined the lead character as “someone like me, an Asian man,” he said. “It was originally written for a male lead. But then once we went through iterations of that, this idea of it being a woman instead just felt more interesting to me and my producers.”

The change in plans led Tan to Cho, known primarily as a ribald comic performer. But Tan saw depths in Cho that made him think she could switch gears and embody Emma’s sadness. As it turned out, Cho had her own predisposition toward the role.

Sitting in her backyard in Los Angeles with her chihuahua, Lucia, Cho, who has rescued dogs for the last 30 years, recalled the trauma of losing her own “heart dog,” Ralph (pronounced “Rafe,” like the actor Ralph Fiennes, for whom he was named) in 2009.

“He was like the love of my life, and I really was permanently changed by that death,” she said, as Lucia alternated between licking her face and wriggling toward a squirrel. “Pet grief is something that is very personal and very intense, and sometimes people don’t exactly move on. That’s what I really connected with Emma about. That was, to me, very real.”

Cho is so tuned in to the dog world that she was even familiar with her canine costars. “The larger one, Wiley, who plays Tanner, is like the George Clooney of dogs,” she said. “He’s in everything. He’s just the best, the most focused and warm. The chance to work with animals is really special.”

Meanwhile, Tan’s grief journey continues.

“I don’t yet know if closure is on the horizon,” he said. “But I’m grateful to have this outlet for reflection and healing, and my hope is that the film, in its own way, brings solace to others who may be navigating their own losses.”

BOSTON ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

Oct. 17-27, various locations. “All That We Love” shows 7 p.m. Oct. 17 at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Cambridge. Tickets and information: baaff.org.

Culture writer Chris Vognar was the 2009 Nieman Arts and Culture Fellow at Harvard University.