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

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

Found

Pacific Film Archive Hosts Young Filmmakers on the Big Screen

In the YouTube-Facebook-viral video era, it’s hard to remember the time when youth-made media was rare. Now in its 10th year, “Screenagers,” playing at the Pacific Film Archive this weekend, is a film series that began before the eyes of the world turned to under-21s and before that demographic’s camera phones became the eyes of the world.

topics: activism, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, youth

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

Report

Thoughts on the aughts: best/worst trends of the year and decade

A decade as odd as this one, with George Bush and Barack Obama as its bookends, deserves to be examined. While the U.S. moved from rebuilding decimated skyscrapers to the rebuilding of an entire economy, film moved from the multiplex to the mailbox to the cell phone. But did the pictures really get small? We tried to find out by surveying Bay Area film-industry professionals as well as everyday fans on the trends that moved them. We found love for animation and hate for the ascendancy of the first-person narrator-star in documentary films. We saw pleas for more collaboration and less ego. We encountered disdain for CGI and hope for independent exhibitors and filmmakers. The comments below were selected from many we received; needless to say, we couldn’t publish everything. If you feel we missed anything in particular, we encourage you to issue a few opinions of your own in the "comments" box at story’s end.

topics: activism, actors, animation, bay area, cinephiles, critics, critics year end polls, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary film, drama, environmental films, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, tv, 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

Critic's Notebook

Graphic transformation: Animation rises, CGI sinks in 2009

Science fiction has often dwelt upon the fear that machines will overtake man—which of course they kind of have, from the Industrial Revolution through the Digital Age, in terms of lessening the need for manual labor or even organic brainpower. But while technology may have taken some jobs, polluted our environment, etc., it hasn’t yet completely stolen humanity’s place in the scheme of things.

Except, one could argue, in the realm of movies. With this year’s summings-up extended to considering our first post-millennial decade, it’s a good moment to consider where mainstream cinema has gone since CGI sank its bloodless talons into the already less-than-exquisite corpse.

topics: animation, anime, bay area, comedy, cult cinema, filmmakers, genre films, hollywood, independent film, internet, red vic movie house, sf international animation festival, world cinema, youth