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CineSource Collective Narrative
Mise En Scene Nov 10 • Chinese American Film: Ancient to Avant
With the Chinese American Film Festival running through November 23rd at the 4 Star in San Francisco—a wild ride ranging from Donnie Yen's new martial arts hit, "Ip Man 2," to the masterful Chow Yun-Fat in "Confucius"— and the release of a four-disc set of documentaries by Arthur Dong (the release party opened the fest), it is the month of the tiger for Chinese film.
Of course, Chinese filmmakers have long been hard at work in Northern California. Indeed, Dong unearthed the forgotten 1916 silent "The Curse of Quon Gwon" made by two Oakland sisters. Now considered both the earliest Asian American film and one of the earliest by women directors, "The Curse” screened November 13 at CAFF with a score by Judy Rosenberg, the Mills College director of music, and attendance by Mabel and Violet Wong, descendents of the filmmakers. Another Dong doc is "Forbidden City, U.S.A.," 1989, about a smoking hot, WWII-era, Chinese nightclub on Sutter Street.
"There's all this culturally rich material that hasn't been seen, really," Dong told SF Gate (11/11/10). "The places it documents (are) part of a larger history, and San Francisco is very much a part of this." But Dong is not only about archival material. his “Hollywood Chinese" tells of more typical as well as recent film scene successes like Joan Chen, Nancy Kwan, B.D. Wong.
Japanese Film
Not to be outdone in the film showcasing department, Japantown now sports VIZ Cinema on Post Street directly across from the Kabuki. While the latter is Japanese in name only, the VIZ focuses on Japan from the latest releases to Kurosawa classics, anime, docs and more.
Claiming to be the only venue of this kind in the country, the VIZ theatre is both expansive and underground—literally, it has 143 seats and is downstairs. But it features above ground tech: premier HD digital projection and a THX sound system.
Get a mindful of Mishima, one of the most iconoclastic authors ever to burst out of Japan, in a retrospective starting the day after Thanksgiving. Not only does it feature the masterful “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” by “Taxi Driver” author Paul Schrader, but Yokio Mishima himself playing a young yakuza in the New Wave cult film “Afraid to Die,” an ironic title considering his own ritual suicide.
San Francisco Film Society Keeps Expanding
The Film Society’s second annual Cinema by the Bay fest at the Roxie frolicked earlier this month through a bunch of good local films and a half a dozen honorees. The latter, who made an “indelible mark on the Bay Area's progressively evolving filmmaking community,” according to the website, included Les Blank, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gail Silva and Marlon Rigs.
The series kicked off with “Fanny, Annie & Danny,” Chris Brown’s lauded and awarded piece about a dysfunctional trio of twenty-something siblings, which premiered at the Mill Valley. It also included “Babnik” by another talented director/writer/cinematographer, Alejandro Adams. His third outing, “Babnik” is about a San Francisco-based Russian sex-trafficking ring but, considering Adam’s writing and philosophizing on film and his previous work, it is undoubtedly undergirded by provocative ideas and “B-to-A” film transcendence.
If you’re a local filmmaker, look to August 2011 to get you paperwork into Cinema by the Bay, and a little earlier for the Mill Valley Fest, which featured over two dozen local features this year.
Glover Does Insurance Company Short
San Francisco’s own Danny Glover, with 119 films listed on IMDB, is not only one of the hardest working men in film showbiz but the most varied. In addition to his mainstream work, over a dozen Hollywood films already this year, last year Glover did “The Harimaya Bridge” (see CS article), a multileveled Black-Japanese love story by freshman Aaron Woolfolk. In 2007, he starred in “Namibia, The Struggle for Liberation,” an ambitious epic partially financed by the Namibian government but directed by the visionary Charles Burnett, who did the acclaimed but little known “Killer of Sheep,” (1977).
Glover goes the other way, in length, content and audience, in his latest, a pair of six and half minute pieces for Liberty Mutual to promote a new campaign and the slogan "Responsibility. What's your policy?" Liberty’s execs are laudably artistic as well as identity-minded considering their Spike Lee theme—“doing the right thing.”
"Second Line" follows an angry San Franciscan businessman whose car won't start one morning and, after a meltdown, finally stops to smell the coffee (organic and shade-grown). Glover stars and directs and it costars Felicity Huffman, who is white, as the wife, in traditional San Fran ecumenicalism.
Cutting and Drugging Film Hit at American Indian Festival
19 year-old writer and filmmaker Janessa Starkey, of the United Auburn Indian Community in the Sierra foothills, showed her film, "Behind the Door of a Secret Girl," at the recent American Indian Film Festival. A “cutter” herself, when she lived with her meth addicted mom and her mother’s gangster boyfriend, Starkey began the screen play when she was 14 by writing a three-page story and handing it to Jack Kohler, the film teacher at the tribal school.
Also Indian, Kohler got into acting and traditional Indian singing and drumming while at Stanford University. Abandoning his engineering career to become an actor and producer in San Francisco, Kohler produced and narrated the documentary "River of Renewal," now airing on PBS. It concerns water and land rights along the Klamath River, his ancestral land.
There are not many mainstream media stories of the "generations of pain" among American Indians, despite it being built into the psyche of the nation. "I hadn't really seen a film about a depressed teenage girl who cuts herself," Starkey told reporter Jesse Hamlin (SF Chronicle, 10/29/2010) by phone from the United Auburn Indian Community Tribal School, where she now teaches.
"It needed to be told," said Kohler about Starkey’s story, which he spent three years helping Starkey hone. "We talked about how to create more tension and conflict, how to develop character."
"Jack gave me something to work toward," said Starkey, who had written poetry but felt listless until she fell in love with filmmaking. "He made me sit down and rewrite the script. He helped me through the process."
"I did cut myself," admitted Starkey, who explained it was a way to release her depression and angst. She also told Hamlin she hadn’t talked about it much. "I wanted to find a better way of dealing with my depression, so instead of hurting myself, I decided to write this film."
The American Indian Film Festival, produced by San Francisco's American Indian Film Institute, is the oldest and best known Native American film festival in the country (much as the SF Jewish and SF International are the oldest in their sectors). Running through Nov. 13, it screened 120 features, documentaries, animated shorts and music videos.
Ex’pression Students Garner Awards
Ex’pression College, the most artistically designed of the Bay Area’s two dozen film/video schools and departments—check out its colorful postmodern architecture next time you are in Emeryville (hard right off of 80E at the Ashby Exit)—just had some motion graphics students take top prizes at the national competition future@motion competition in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jon Corriveau, Brady Lowery, Sam McCann, and Daamun Mohseni placed first with an entry entitled “Scalpel Ad,” and Lydia Baillergeau and Karen Wong took third for “Text First Talk Second” (see vimeo). The latter was part of nationwide competition for PSAs called “Safe America.”
“The closer I get to graduation, the more I want to take advantage of every opportunity to network with the industry,” remarked Mohseni. "Attending motion provided me with two solid days of industry-related information, while meeting potential employers and colleagues." “We are proud of our students,” added Yael Braha, Ex’pression’s program director for motion design. “Placing in four of the top five spots is an incredible achievement.”
One of the few schools that focuses on motion arts and app development, Ex’pression was founded in 1999 by the late Dutch entrepreneur Eckart Wintzen and has grads at Pixar, Dreamworks, Disney, and elsewhere across the industry.
Bay Area Casting Director Starts Screenplay Competition
Writer, author and Bay Area Casting director, Hester Schell, has announced a screenplay competition (deadline 4/30/2011) to commemorate the opening of the Devil’s Slide Tunnel south of Pacifica, with local indie producer Debbie Brubaker as one of the panelists. The Devil’s Slide Tunnel Vision Writers’ Project will also award other writing (poetry, short story, short novel, and one act play or musical) and will feature performances of the winners. “It’s all about tunnels, tunnel vision, light at the end of the tunnel—however this metaphor speaks to you as a writer,” said Schell.
SFAI Laid Off Teachers Still Struggling
Over a year ago, CineSource reported on SFAI’s dismissal of the teachers Janis Crystal Lipzin, Charles Boone, Stephanie Ellis, Pat Klein, Suzanne Olmsted, John Rapko and Jon Lang in defiance of their contracts. “It is nothing less than a criminal act against contemporary culture,” claimed Grahame Weinbren, the editor of the Millennium Film Journal.
Since then more than 1215 people signed the petition to reinstate these teachers who formed an important part of the school’s liberal arts as well as film program. Alas, the school hired some labor-busting lawyers, delayed the start of arbitration and ran up the teacher’s legal fees to unprecedented proportions. They have gotten some help, however, and more can be provided by donating generously to the FUSFAI legal fund.