SFIAAFF '09 Student Delegate – Fruit Fly
FRUIT FLY, oh how I could sing your praises for hours! So where do I begin? Okay… so I’ll admit that I’m a bit bias. I’ve been a big fan of H.P. Mendoza’s work since I saw COLMA last year for a class.
FRUIT FLY, oh how I could sing your praises for hours! So where do I begin? Okay… so I’ll admit that I’m a bit bias. I’ve been a big fan of H.P. Mendoza’s work since I saw COLMA last year for a class.
Down at the Castro Theater, the energy emitting from the audience in response to the film was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. In that way, it was almost like an interactive live theater performance. I was laughing so hard I thought I might choke and I certainly wasn’t alone. It was one big inside joke, but everybody was in on it.
Biking, walking through San Francisco, and not even in Japantown or Castro, adds to the festival experience. It’s an angular city. It’s a film in the making.
H.P. Mendoza’s FRUIT FLY expresses that musically, wonderfully
There were a lot of things I expected to get from being in this amazing program, all of which were met above and beyond anything I could have envisioned. What I never expected to get, was to finally find my racial identity.
Inspiration was the name of the game today. We started off the day with the Multimedia/Multiracial Panel. It was really refreshing to connect some of the bigger identity issues seen on screen to an everyday agenda about Asian America.
At one point while watching PROJECT KASHMIR, I thought of the moments Thomas Fowler spends in the South Vietnamese turret in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Those were the quiet, humanly awkward and poignant moments before the turret was blown apart and Fowler’s life saved by Pyle, his rival in romance.
My day started with hanging out with SPEED OF LIFE director Ed Radke and videographer friend Sevgi Stephenson with the student delegates at a nearby cafe. The conversation wandered all around – how to deal with the confusion of what to do next in life, how it’s cool to do what you love
KARMA CALLING follows the Raj family, an Indian family living in New Jersey. An incredibly light but heart-felt film, it makes you believe that no matter what, everything can and will work out in the end if you just believe. A labor of love by Sarba Das and her entire family, it’s an interesting comparison of India coming to America and America coming to India.
What’s in a father? In the three films that I’ve seen so far this year apart of the film festival, Lee Yoon-Ki’s MY DEAR ENEMY, Sarba Das’ KARMA CALLING, and Ed Radtke’s THE SPEED OF LIFE, that question gnaws at me. My insides, retching. An invisible, depressed father . A desperate father that can’t provide for his family. Fathers who are strangers to their sons and lovers. What does any of this mean?
I think my exhaustion has robbed me of witty headings and my convenient pool of descriptive adjectives. And thank goodness I was an hour early to my personal time-clock because I ended up being just on time for the screening of KARMA CALLING. What I want to know is why not more people came to see this movie. Because, yeah, um, with blatant bias, it rocked.
I’m super new to this film festival ordeal. The only ways I’ve experienced movies are in regular theaters, on a small screen with a few friends, or as a topic of discussion in a classroom. KARMA CALLING was the kind of screening that really makes the festival setting win my heart.
Opening night for this year’s SFIAAFF at the Castro Theatre was SPECTACULAR and- as naive as it sounds- unlike any experience that I’ve ever had! It really went by in a flash. After finding my seat in the beautiful, ritzy, busy Castro Theatre amongst my fellow delegates, we chatted anxiously about everything going on around us