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

Experience

After Sept. 11, 2001, a decade found its way

On September 13, 2001, I stood in a small park in downtown Toronto, shocked but confident, and spoke to Canadian television: From now on, movies would not be the same, Hollywood and indie films would change completely. Everything would be different. It had to be, didn’t it?

Well, no, as it turned out.

I was wrong.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is devoting this and the following week to coverage of the year and decade in film.]

topics: activism, argentine cinema, audiences, authors, bay area, critics, critics year end polls, curators, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary, drama, dramatic films, dvd, exhibitio, tv, web, women, women filmmakers, world cinema, youth

Experience

Women Make Movies Film Festival highlights Kim Longinotto

At a panel during this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, film critics were asked to offer a note of hope on a film landscape often characterized as lacking—and B. Ruby Rich responded with enthusiastic praise for a filmmaker she called "unheralded" and "incredibly sensitive," Kim Longinotto. "When more and more documentaries seem to follow either individual pathologies or people who are already famous," Rich said, "it’s really important to see [Longinotto] model looking very deeply into a culture—and extraordinary women in that culture—in a way that’s actually riveting.”

Though not a household name, Longinotto has certainly been getting attention: Her films played at the Pacific Film Archive in 2006; she won the Sundance World Cinema Jury Prize for Rough Aunties this past year; and, beginning this Friday, is under the spotlight at the Women Make Movies Film Festival taking place at the Roxie Theater, which runs through September 3.

topics: activism, african cinema, directors, distribution, distributors, diy, documentary, independent film, iranian cinema, political film, women, women filmmakers, world cinema

Q&A

Britta Sjogren brings the "women's film" paradox to the PFA

Film theory, as any media-inclined graduate student will tell you, is full of gloomy prognostications about what can and cannot be done within cinema. Many of us find the deterministic mode of much theoretical writing dispiriting. A rare few are invigorated by it; an even smaller number are able to mold their fascination into original work. Local filmmaker-scholar Britta Sjogren is one of these talents. In her 2006 book, Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film, Sjogren threads her vexations with feminist film theory into a lively study of sound and voice in classical Hollywood cinema, bringing fresh curiosity and intelligence to taken-for-granted “women’s film” touchstones like Letter from an Unknown Woman and Rebecca. An acclaimed filmmaker in her own right, Sjogren is perhaps more open to contradiction than her purely theoretical counterparts. She revisits her book’s terrain with a six-week program at the Pacific Film Archive spanning a wide range of 40s conundrums and closing with her own feature debut, 1992’s Jo-Jo at the Gate of Lions.

topics: actors, audiences, authors, bay area, directors, genre films, hollywood, pacific film archive, q&a, women