Ask the Documentary Doctor

Social Media and Storytelling

By Fernanda Rossi

Dear Doc Doctor: All this new social media takes time. Lots of time. In the end, will my Facebook posts, tweets or blog entries help me with the story I’m trying to tell? Or is it just more promotional work I have to do to keep the film going? I want to be a filmmaker not an Internet nerd.

topics: activism, authors, diy, documentary, women filmmakers

In Production

Hiler’s ‘Music’ Salutes Symphonic Visionary

By Michael Fox

The so-called culture war is over, and the reactionaries have won. I recall with nostalgia Jesse Helms’ condemnation of the NEA for funding Marlon Riggs’ queer-centric Tongues Untied, and the late East Bay filmmaker’s blisteringly eloquent response. Such public right-wing remonstrations are no longer necessary, for the simple reason that 30 years of overt and covert pressure have cast a permanent chill on Federal and state arts organizations. I daresay the anti-intellectual denigration of culture and higher education, a cornerstone of the Reagan-Bush-Bush Era, is an unacknowledged factor in the current decimation of the public university system (which is conveniently blamed on the Great Recession). In this climate, Jerome Hiler and Owsley Brown III’s Music Makes a City is nothing short of a revelation. Now in its finishing stages, the documentary revisits the remarkable mid-century revival of Louisville, Kentucky, in the wake of the Great Flood of 1937.

topics: activism, composers, directors, documentary, music

Q&A

Red Vic Reprising 'Lesh Sabreen?'

By Robert Avila

Muayad Alayan, a 24-year-old filmmaker from the only remaining Arab neighborhood in West Jerusalem, was not even aware there was such a think as Palestinian cinema until, as a teenager, he came to the Bay Area to visit his brother and sister. Later, after a stint at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, he returned to San Francisco as a film student at City College. Among his teachers was local filmmaker Christian Bruno, who this year traveled to Jerusalem as the director of photography for Alayan’s Lesh Sabreen? (Why Sabreen?, now taking donations).

[SF360.org Editor’s note: This article was originally published July 29, 2008. The film plays Tuesday, March 16, in a special screening of selections from the Arab Film Festival at the Red Vic Movie House.]

topics: activism, arab cinema, bay area, exhibition, red vic movie house

Q&A

Borshay Liem’s Double Exposure of Korean Adoptions

By Michael Fox

Deann Borshay Liem’s terrific 1999 documentary First Person Plural recounted her experience as an orphaned Korean adoptee raised by a Caucasian family in an East Bay suburb. Only she wasn’t an orphan, and the second half of the film is devoted to locating and meeting her birth mother and siblings. A decade later, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee finds Liem revisiting her adoption and identity from another, equally compelling perspective. The Korean documents identified her as Cha Jung Hee, but eight-year-old Deann (as her adoptive parents christened her) knew that wasn’t her name. All these years later, the filmmaker determines to get to the bottom of the mystery, and find the person for whom she was substituted. Scheduled to air nationally on PBS’s “P.O.V.” in September, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee has its world premiere in the "28th San Francisco International Asian America Film Festival": http://festival.asianamericanmedia.org/ this Friday, March 12 at 6:45 at the Clay Theatre, with additional screenings Saturday, March 13 in Berkeley (Pacific Film Archive) and Sunday, March 21 in San Jose (Camera Cinemas).

topics: activism, asian american cinema, directors, documentary, immigration, sf international asian american film festival, women filmmakers, world cinema

Experience

28th SF Int'l Asian American Film Festival Opens

By Dennis Harvey

This year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival observes an organizational milestone: 2010 marks the beginning of a fourth decade for the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), hitherto known (until 2005) as the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA).

CAAM’s and NAATA’s achievements over the last 30 years are too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that an organization originally founded to nurture Asian American filmmakers (an effort given further muscle by strong support from the Center for Public Broadcasting) as well as counter ethnic stereotypes still prevailing in popular media (perhaps peaking with the protests against mid-late ’80s thrillers Year of the Dragon and Black Rain) has long since accomplished all that and more. Today’s CAAM can look back on helping to foster such important high-profile voices as Wayne Wang and Ang Lee, while stoking both present and future makers via its distribution, PBS presentation and funding arms.

topics: activism, actors, asian american cinema, asian cinema, audiences, bay area, sf international asian american film festival, women filmmakers, world cinema, youth