Q&A

Borshay Liem’s Double Exposure of Korean Adoptions

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

Report

Jennifer Phang on "Half-Life" and identity

Filmmaker Jennifer Phang’s experienced more than enough culture shocks in her life to empathize with the identity challenges of the men and women in her first feature, Half-Life, which is being released via VOD and DVD from Wolfe Video and Warner Digital this month. In Half-Life’s psychological drama, part live action, part animation, Pam, the 19-year old daughter, and Timothy, the 8-year old son of an Asian American mother, try to cope with their father’s disappearance and their mother’s affair with a young white lover. In the meantime, Pam’s only friend, a Korean adoptee, trying to find some sense of individualism and self-worth, has to find a way to reveal the existence of his African American lover to his fundamentalist Christian white parents.

topics: activism, asian american cinema, audiences, bay area, diy, film festivals, gay lesbian cinema, immigration, sf international asian american film festival, women, women filmmakers, world cinema, youth

In Production

Nani Walker finds "Other Nature" at 15,000 feet

Nani Sahra Walker went to Nepal for seven months, and came back with a one-hour documentary. OK, a rough cut. No big deal? Try this, you hard-to-impress types: In 2007, Nepal’s Supreme Court struck down laws discriminating against homosexuals, then a year later approved same-sex marriages—and directed the government to provide full rights to gays and lesbians. Enlightenment guaranteed, indeed. The central thread of Other Nature, as it happens, is a pilgrimage by the main characters—a female-to-male transgender and a male-to-female trans—to the sacred place of Muktinath in the Mustang region. “There’s no real arc,” Walker says, disavowing the shape of Western documentaries. “There’s journey, and we keep coming back to the journey.”

topics: activism, bay area, distribution, diy, documentary, gay lesbian cinema, immigration, world cinema

In Production

Rainin winners prime new wave of social-issue dramas

For the great majority of the public, documentaries are still educational films while narrative features are “the movies.” It’s the rare fiction feature film that handles social justice themes without condescension and oversimplification. The San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grants were created to support the local development of lively and intelligent social-issue narrative films, with the hope of strengthening the San Francisco filmmaking community—and bringing more forward-thinking films by talented makers into general release. The grants, which run 2009-13, will be awarded in the spring and fall of each year and the total amount disbursed over these five years will be more than $3 million. The inaugural class for the $35,000 grants consists of Amanda Micheli and Jeff Zimbalist, Fall 2009, Richard Levien, Spring 2009. Here’s the scoop on their projects.

topics: activism, bay area, directors, how-to, immigration, independent film, political film, screenwriting

In Production

Daven Gee discovers and uncovers the new American family

Oakland gets a ton of bad press but it’s a dynamic melting pot that’s on the leading edge in some surprising ways. Daven Gee and Deann Borshay Liem have found a motherlode of fresh subjects, and are shooting two documentaries in the big city spotlighting the latest refugees in search of the American dream (Dhana & Indra) and a globe-spanning extended family connected by a single sperm donor (Family 2469). Both films illuminate the changing face of the country as the 21st Century unfolds. “I’m interested in the changing shape of American culture, especially by generations of immigrants,” Gee says.

topics: activism, bay area, diy, documentary film, immigration, world cinema

Take Two

PFA offers a look at the exiled Ingrid Bergman

Before Ingrid Bergman, European starlets exported to Hollywood tended to be exotics, femmes fatales, mystery women—always the “other,” whether a grand tragedienne like Garbo or a vamp like Pola Negri.

Bergman was the first girl next door whose door happened to originate several thousand miles from Anytown, U.S.A. Even when she played “bad girls,” the American public trusted she was really above reproach. When they decided otherwise, she was virtually exiled for some years—sent back to Europe, where (diehard American Puritans imagined) such fallen women belonged.

topics: actors, european film, genre films, hollywood, immigration, italian cinema

In Production

Telles charts "Storm" of Mexican Revolution

Not long after he began developing a film about the Mexican Revolution, Ray Telles was introduced to four men who’d fought with Emiliano Zapata. “We have to get these guys,” he implored prospective funders. “By the time we’re in production, they’ll be dead.” Incredibly, the veterans were more than 100 years old when the East Bay filmmaker interviewed them in 2002. “A couple of them were pretty vivid,” he recalls. “It was such a moment in their lives. One was with the Zapata army when he was assassinated [in 1919], and it burned it in his memory. It brings him to tears. He talks about how they all stood by when Zapata went into Hacienda de Chinameca and came out bloodied, and they all knew what happened.”

topics: activism, awards, bay area, immigration, latin american cinema, latin cinema