I’ve been alerted by my all so loyal blogging fans that I’ve been slacking in my duties, and to that I apologize. So some of the stuff going on in the world of Among B-Boys and Christopher Woon. I’ve been finishing a video for a client (OASES 25th Anniversary celebration tonight!) and been chasing that funding paper trail. I’m also set to join a team promoting the ever so entertaining B-Boy Hella Hung, and projects revolving Hung that are in development.
What’s more interesting in a documentary? A story about one person or many? If you capture the lives of four or five individuals, it seems like you would have an interesting mix of narrative threads to follow. But if you follow just one person around, you might not get enough action to fill out your film.
HOLLYWOOD CHINESE starts in Manhattan on May 2 at Quad Cinema. Chat with Tony Award-winning playwright and HOLLYWOOD CHINESE cast member David Henry Hwang in person for post-screening Q & A, May 4, Sunday, 2:50pm screening only. Limited seating, advance tickets advised!
KQED Education Network and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley present a screening and discussion of Bolinao 52, a Vietnamese boat people documentary on Thursday, May 1, at 7:00 pm in Sibley Auditorium (Bechtel Engineering Center) on the UC Berkeley campus. This free screening will feature a discussion with the filmmaker Duc Nguyen.
CAAM Media Funded documentary Calavera Highway premieres Sunday, May 4, 6:15 pm at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post St. at Fillmore, San Francisco
Well, kind of… I should explain. Since July 2007, WHATEVER IT TAKES has been supported by the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund. Besides CAAM, Sundance has been our other major backer, providing us with not only a large grant, but also much needed creative and technical assistance.
In 1977, director and producer Beth Pielert was sitting in a Hebrew school class reading about Anne Frank who perished in the Holocaust and was told never to let something like the Holocaust happen again. But even at just age seven and 13,000 miles away, genocide was happening all over again in Cambodia.Years later Pielert met a former Nuremberg prosecutor who sparked a theme for a film – people who were creators of justice after a great injustice had occurred. After being introduced to one of the founders of the Yale Cambodian Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, Pielert began researching films that had been made about Cambodia and discovered many detailed accounts of the genocide, but none that explored the forgiveness or reconciliation process – this was 1998.
Fast forward to 2006 where the subjects and characters of Pielert’s documentary, OUT OF THE POISON TREE, take us on a journey toward understanding what happened in Cambodia and how people have come to forgive after ‘The Killing Fields.’ It follows Thida Buth Mam, an American survivor of the Khmer Rouge, as she returns to her home country with hopes of unlocking the mystery of her father’s disappearance in 1975. Mam’s quest intersects with many silent voices: widows, survivors from remote villages, monks and even former perpetrators. Her search for the truth stirs up fractured pieces of one family’s nightmare, unearths an unimaginable heartbreak and ultimately shines light on a people’s broken silence. OUT OF THE POISON TREE is even more relevant today as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal proceedings continue on, prosecuting those who committed serious crimes during the 1975-1979 regime.For more information and related classroom activities, download or print the nine-page OUT OF THE POISON TREE Educator’s Guide . The documentary is available on DVD for educational purchase or rental from CAAM Educational Distribution.For other similar films about Cambodia, check out REFUGEE, THE FLUTE PLAYER and MONKEY DANCE.
A four-hour documentary series exploring our socio-economic and racial inequities in health. Airing four consecutive Thursdays at 10:00pm, March 27 to April 17, 2008.
LITTLE MANILA: Filipinos in California’s Heartland tells the immigrant story as Filipinos experienced it.
SIKHS IN AMERICA is a half hour documentary profiling the Sikh community in the United States. The program takes an in-depth look inside the Sikh community with its religious and cultural practices, social and family traditions, and economic and work life.
Everyone tells you that you can’t make a film by yourself. So true. But while it’s absolutely crucial to have a wonderful camera crew and editing team, it also really helps to have an awesome film organization (or two) backing you up. For this project, we have had amazing support from CAAM, and I want to spend some time bragging about them… (FYI, CAAM did not put me up to this; this is completely my own doing.)
For those of you who have been keeping track of this blog about my film “Whatever It Takes”, let me first apologize for being a bad, bad blogger these past four weeks. I do have a decent excuse, though, because I was incredibly busy planning some fundraising events in three different cities. As someone who has never done this before, let’s just say that it was (and continues to be) a mighty difficult undertaking.