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CineSource Collective Narrative
In LA, dropping off CineSources and taking the temperature We just got back from LA, dropping off CineSources – they’re becoming popular at rental houses like HD Camera on Jefferson and T-Stop on Melrose – and taking the temperature. They don’t seem to be suffering that much, save in the mid-level industrial zone. Commercial features are doing great. Although “Hangover,” a typical LA romantic comedy, edged out our team’s more melancholic Pixar hit, “Up,” box office revenue is booming – projected to be up 10% or more from last year, a phenomenal increase.
The indie cineastes we talked to in Venice also seemed undeterred and dreaming big. Driving up the coast was a needed meditation for our own big picture, especially with a hot bath at Esalon – designed by Mickey Muenig, green architect extrodinaire and friend, with some great Big Sur locations.
The beauty was suddenly shattered, however, by a radio report that Bay Area filmmakers Euna Lee and Laura Ling had gotten 12 years hard labor in North Korea’s notorious labor camps. In – @#%* – sane!!! We’ll be covering their tragic story in the big double summer issue of CineSource – also featuring our production survey, still open for filing, by the way.
This can be called California’s structural ambiguity, beautiful nature and sad human reality, side by side. Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, were sentenced for the "grave crime they committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing," according to the (North) Korean Central News Agency.
“Working with Euna, the little time I did, and being such a sweet heart and a mom, I just can’t imagine her doing anything they say she did,” said Julie Rubio, a filmmaker whose yoga video was late-night edited and essentially saved by Lee. “Sometimes when you work intimately and hardcore on a film you see sides of their personality you don’t even see in friends.”
Indeed, that is the sort of teary-eyed, film-family stuff we feel at CineSource, when we aren’t playing hard bitten journalists. Kidding aside, the Lee/Ling case is insanely serious, protests are in order, films, emails, anything. Please contact us if you know Ling or Lee and can contribute quotes or photos. And look for the article Jul/Aug CS.