MAY 2007, Part D: Prizes? Who Needs Prizes?
A number of years back, the question was put to me during a panel discussion as to why our film festival confers competitive jury awards. At the time, the question was legit: after all, why institute a competitive award, complete with cash and valuable goods and services when the whole practice might serve to create a have/have not system among our artists. While I remember giving a not-too-coherent response to the question, I've had a chance to ponder the question in subsequent years while watching how our VC FILMFEST selections -- mostly shorts, but in recent years features as well -- have performed in other festivals.
To put it succinctly (and not to be sanctimonious about it), the films we program benefit greatly from the imprimatur of "award-eligible" that we bestow upon our selections. In the absence of a viable delivery system of "marginalized" media controlled, programmed, developed, marketed and managed by people of color (read: theatre chains, television network, satellite/broadband, internet, movie studios), venues such as VC FILMFEST have to be much more creative and open to "outside-the-box" means of insuring that events such as our Festival does not become a week of dead-end screenings, but the agent of continued and sustained opportunity for our filmmakers. And if that means organizing such "sell-out" mechanisms as film awards, well I've made my peace with that a long time ago.
As well, the work of our program committee to select awards finalists each year hopefully gives our selections an enhanced opportunity to be noticed. More importantly, we'll hopefully serve notice to filmmakers seeking to be included in the program line-up that they need to step up their filmmaking craft, that "cinema as usual" just won't cut it, and that if they're seeking to submit sloppy, incoherent or just-plain lazy work expecting to get a pass from their hometown film festival -- well, they're in for a rude surprise.
Even if their works aren't one of the selected few for awards consideration, the opportunity to shine in front of their peers, their families and community (not to mention visiting film festival programmers, eductator, distributors and exhibitors) should be incentive enough to put on their best effort. Take the case of one of our former program committee members, Juli Kang. Her UCLA MFA Thesis project
DAMN THE PAST! premiered on Opening Weekend to a packed house and is being spoken of as a true Festival Week audience fave; yet, it wasn't initially selected as an awards finalist. No matter -- she got the word out to ALL her family, friends, and industry associates; and worked hand-in-hand with the Festival to make sure industry professionals saw her program. Needless to say, her hard work is beginning to pay dividends -- programmers have started to pay attention to her, word-of-mouth has been positive, and as a result,
DAMN THE PAST! is poised for a long festival tour lasting into 2008. Damn the certificate -- adulation, affirmation, attention and more opportunity is indeed its own reward for hard work and inspiration.
MAY 2007, Part C: Catching My Breath
Some random thoughts as VC FILMFEST embarks on its second and final leg -- the Festival in J-Town:
1) On Opening Night, none other than Ron Jeremy showed up -- he had a memorable speaking role in Justin Lin's FINISHING THE GAME opposite Sung Kang, and as he was posing with countless guests at the post-screening reception, I could only think of one thing: why would people want to shake his hand? Do people know where it's been???
2) I met actor Rondell Sheridan at the Screenwriters' panel on Saturday, a rare treat as I religiously watch his show, THAT'S SO RAVEN every Saturday morning on ABC. A true celebrity sighting, indeed.
3) Some sniffling in the audience at the THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI screening on Saturday. Much of the same audience ran right across the street to the screening of Desmond Nakano's AMERICAN PASTIME and rubbed shoulders with stars Aaron Yoo and Leonardo Nam.
4) I hang out with all the Vietnamese and French folks after the screening of SAIGON ECLIPSE, and have my first margarita in what must have been ages. For some, the party is never over, as Ham Tran organizes a company move to Silverlake to a hooka bar. I'm like, a hooka bar at 3:30 in the morning on a Sunday??? Sorry dude, I gotta get up in the morning.
5) There was a Bai Ling sighting at the Festival! Enough said...
6) Oh my gawd...is this journal turning into an Asian American fan boy blog???
MAY 2007, Part B: Pondering Wild West Kultcha
The other night, I was rewatching director Chen Shi-Zheng's DARK MATTER (a film that for a variety of reasons was not included in the final program line-up of VC FILMFEST) in order to find some kind of logic -- any kind of logic -- as to the nature of pathological violence. Anyone who has been watching the news the past couple of weeks must certainly be familiar with the massacre at Virginia Tech and the disquieting similarities with the real-life events at the core of DARK MATTER's narrative. For awhile, select members of our programming team did a double-take at some of the other works in this year's Festival and wondered aloud if we would unwittingly upset some sensibilities among our audiences. Things weren't assuaged when we received the full-color advertisement of one of our major sponsors -- a promo for an upcoming computer video game featuring a certain Hong Kong superstar in a pose that unintentionally mimics that of the V-Tech killer's most iconic image. Concerns were expressed, and at least one programmer reacted by asking to opt out of a hosting assignment of one of our films, a body-count film uncomfortably close to real-life events. At the end of the day, with a week's time to consider the connection of real-life events to his hosting assignment, he thought better of his decision and agreed to follow through.
For years and years now, we've been confronted by submissions that trade heavily on "genre" subject matters including violence as a result of misogyny, domestic abuse, gang and/or crime culture -- fill in the blank. I don't know why, but from my personal perspective, many of these works failed in part because the filmmakers were all too willing to employ stereotypes in the name of reality; but mostly, these movies have never sat well with me because they were incompetently made. It's one thing to have to make an audience sit through two hours of shootin', lootin' and killin'. To have to make that audience sit through two hours of inexcusably shoddy filmmaking in the name of "real" portrayals of Asian Amerikkkans in da hood is inexcusable, and as a result I've been mauled badly over the years by filmmakers complaining why I'm so inhospitable to submissions that channel the filmmaking style of Wong Kar-wai and John Woo, but lack an once of soul or craft.
Maybe I'm being too harsh. Or maybe I'm letting my aversions to all things insufferably male-centric come through when I should think better of it -- after all, I'm not THAT big a fan of THE JOY LUCK CLUB. In any event, males, testosterone and guns seem to occupy most of the subject matter that we see. And I'm not so sure I like that.
Though we indeed have works in this year's program that may, at first blush, trade on the very things I despise, I have to reference the acumen of my colleague David: he programs by intuition -- "I understand why you don't like it, but you know, there's a
there there..." Maybe I should follow David's advice...we programmed this year's Festival with works we believed in because there was a
there there, so we should be brave and stick with our gut reactions. Even if it looks like we, uh, I might be contradicting myself...
MAY 2007, Part A: Sex? Or Magic?
There is a thin line that exists between true love and unbridled sex. I'm not talking about porn, though we came pretty close to satisfying that segment of our audience hungry for Japanese "pink eiga" films through our programming this year. No, the kind of stories I'm talking about are ones in which filmmakers place multi-faceted aspects of love, romance, and sexuality as an integral ingredient of compelling storytelling. So what if the random breast (well, copious depictions and representations thereof) and male/female genitalia abound throughout our programming this year? In this year's edition of VC FILMFEST, filmmakers not only confront all aspects of "nakedness," but pay just as much attention, if not more so, to the inevitable morning after -- both literal and figurative.
Take, for instance, Lou Ye's
SUMMER PALACE, which includes numerous scenes of college coeds having hot n' heavy sex, complete with both female AND male full frontal nudity (gasp!!!). This would be considered quite scatalogical and frivolous if not for the setting: late 1980s Beijing, in the months leading up to the June 6, 1989 government crackdown of student protestors in Tiananmen Square. Seen in this context,
SUMMER PALACE is at once an altogether different sort of coming-of-age film: one in which the potential of youthful ideas and experimentation is blunted by both time and dissolusion. As the main characters disperse around the world and take up other pursuits, the dualities of love/hate play against the realities of growing up, damning both one's faith in progressive ideals and in true love. The end result is a film that is at once epic, brilliant, messy, and unresolved. Kind of like the relationship at the core of the story.
I've made mention of Anna Biller's
VIVA in an earlier entry, but the vast expanses of flesh (again, b oth male and female) that dominate much of the film serves a dual purpose: sex and nudity firmly place the film's characters within a distinct social and cultural milieu; and foregrounds the director's resolve in being true to her characters -- she herself plays the lead character, Barbi, and spends much of her screen time either nude, or having sex, or both! Such commitment!
A far tamer (and arguably, less frank) brand of sexuality is on display in both Gene B. Rhee's
THE TROUBLE WITH ROMANCE and Othello Khanh's
SAIGON ECLIPSE. Rhee's film, a veiled riff on Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's FOUR ROOMS and Park Ki-yong's MOTEL CACTUS, observes the ambiguities of modern romance within the walls of a luxury hotel. And
SAIGON ECLIPSE, the second of three features starring Dustin Nguyen, is yet another retelling of Vietnam's national peom, Truyen Kieu (The Tale of Kieu). Modern, sexy and thoroughly accessible, this tale of Kieu is as much male eye-candy as tragic romance.
Love and sex is not limited to the young, as evidenced by Michael T. Uno's
THE WASH, which features vetran actors Mako and Nobu McCarthy making whoopie in a last-ditch attempt to rekindle a failed marriage. And it doesn't come without grave consequences, as seen in Nadine Truong's
THE MUSE, in which the randomness of circumstance visits a young artist in a most cruel way.
There are a lot of other images throughout the selections in this year's Festival that may strike audiences as risque or offensive. My thoughts on the matter is: look deeper -- MUCH deeper. Representations of both physical and emotional love, not to mention honest depictions of sex (different from porn!!!) will be, I think, much welcomed this year.
