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

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

Experience

28th SF Int'l Asian American Film Festival Opens

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

Critic's Notebook

Gazing West with 'Sweetgrass'

There will probably never be a theatrical release for a film by James Benning, the Southern California-based filmmaker who recently made one of his frequent Bay Area visits for a four-night series of works presented by San Francisco Cinematheque. Benning’s landscape-focused movies often consist of very long stationary shots (sometimes as long as ten minutes each) sans commentary, interviews, explanatory text, or any sound save live found ones. They’re extraordinary, if a little too “pure” for the average moviegoer—even most arthouse habitues.

Amazingly, however, the marital filmmaking team of Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor have managed not only to score theatrical distribution but also make something of a splash with Sweetgrass, a new documentary opening this weekend that is almost as hypnotically austere in style and content as the films in Benning’s oeuvre.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary, environmental films, women filmmakers, world cinema

Experience

"Freak" Flag Flying at YBCA

Because it’s a place where contemporary visual art, pop culture themes, live performance of myriad disciplines and recorded media comingle, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has sustained a major place in San Francisco’s cultural landscape since 1993—yet perhaps without quite receiving the due it would have had its mission been narrower and more easily defined.

That resistance to precise classification is, actually, much of what we like about YBCA. In the film/video department alone, longtime curator Joel Shepard has carved out a unique Bay Area programmatic niche that can encompass retrospectives of important but little-seen current international fiction and documentary directors alongside shows that reflect a distinct fondness for for vintage exploitation, subcultural artifacts and cinematic “outsider art.”

All three of the latter are on display in the venue’s new series “Freaks, Punks, Skanks and Cranks."

topics: actors, bay area, music, women filmmakers, yerba buena center for the arts, youth

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

Take Two

'Fish Tank' finds truth

Writer-director Andrea Arnold created a stir with her first feature Red Road, which scooped up the 2006 Cannes Prix du Jury among a slew of other awards. (She’d also won the Live Action Short Oscar a year prior for Wasp.) It was a dark and surprising drama about a Glasgow woman who develops an obsessive, stalker-type interest in an ex-con who’s unaware they’d had a significant prior encounter long before.

The new Fish Tank which opens this Friday in Bay Area theaters, is arguably an even stronger work. It confirms Arnold—writing solo this time, where Red Road was based on characters created by others for a unique Denmark-Scotland coproduction trilogy—as one of the most promising screen talents to emerge from Britain in recent years.

topics: actors, british cinema, directors, women filmmakers