Critic's Notebook

SF International Asian American Film Festival Visits the Archives

A theme that emerged in this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) was the importance of archives in the film world. The existence of film archives and restoration facilities all have a part to play in the films of Lino Brocka (who received retrospective treatment in the fest), Kim Ki-young’s 1960s classic The Housemaid, Ruby Yang’s documentary A Moment in Time (about Chinese American movie houses of old San Francisco), documentaries such as Aoki and State of Aloha that make heavy use of archival footage to tell their non-fiction narratives, and even an Austrian director’s film about representatives of the North Korean women’s soccer team, Hana, Dul, Sed….　

topics: activism, asian american cinema, asian cinema, audiences, authors, awards, bay area, blogs, sf international asian american film festival

Ask the Documentary Doctor

Social Media and Storytelling

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

Fear-Free Fundraising

Do ask, do tell

I’ve been raising money for 20 years. During my career, I have asked people for all kinds of money for all kinds of reasons. However, whether I’m asking for $1,000 or $100,000, I have found that there are some key concepts that rule.

These are my Hella Hot Tips for how to ask people for money. The good news is that this isn’t brain surgery. It’s common sense. If you take these key concepts and use them as your guide for individual donor fundraising, you, too, will raise money.

topics: authors, bay area, diy, funding

Experience

Reed Redeems Promise of ‘Prodigal Sons’

If Kimberly Reed took a not particularly unique path into filmmaking, she certainly took an interesting road out of it. A native of Helena, Montana, she came to U.C. Berkeley in the late ’80s, discovered film and went on to earn a master’s degree at S.F. State while working in the seminars department at Film Arts Foundation. After transitioning from male to female, the challenge of adjusting to a new identity impelled her to trade her location (San Francisco for New York) and career (digital editing for magazine publishing). Call it necessity, call it a detour, but it’s in the rear-view mirror now. She makes a triumphant return to both filmmaking and the Bay Area with her first-person documentary Prodigal Sons, a raw and altogether remarkable debut that opens this month around the country.

topics: activism, authors, bay area, diy, documentary, documentary film, film arts foundation, frameline, independent film, sf international lgbt film festival

Fear-Free Fundraising

Do ask, do tell

I’ve been raising money for 20 years. During my career, I have asked people for all kinds of money for all kinds of reasons. However, whether I’m asking for $1,000 or $100,000, I have found that there are some key concepts that rule.

topics: authors, bay area, diy, funding

In Production

Cohen, Lipman Follow Recovering Friend Through ‘Forest’

On May 21, 2008, Dr. Grace Dammann was injured in a head-on car crash on the Golden Gate Bridge. She spent 45 days in a coma and 13 months in the hospital, gradually working her way back from the edge. When the doctors finally released her last June, Helen S. Cohen and Mark Lipman were ready with a camera. “We jumped in literally the day she went home,” Cohen recalls, “and filmed the arduous process of wheelchair to car to wheelchair to ramp to home” at Green Gulch Farm in Muir Beach. The husband-and-wife team has been rolling ever since, but the shape and structure of their film remains very much up in the air.

topics: activism, authors, bay area, diy, documentary film

In Production

Wendy Slick’s ‘Virtuoso’ Turn

Olga Samaroff, the path-breaking 20th-century concert pianist, critic and teacher with the exotic Russian name, was born Lucy Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Texas. You guessed it—she reinvented herself, out of necessity as much as ambition. “Olga was raised in a musical family, but at that time it was very difficult for a woman to be a musician,” says Wendy Slick, co-director with Donna S. Kline of Virtuoso: The Olga Samaroff Story. “And there was anti-Americanism. To be a classical musician you had to be European, and usually a male. [Women] could be teachers, but it wasn’t happening as much then that a woman would be a major concert artist. It was frowned upon.” The imposition of constraints on women was also a central theme in Slick’s last film (made with Emiko Omori), Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm, about the history of the vibrator. Now do we have your attention?

topics: audiences, authors, bay area, diy, documentary, music, women filmmakers