Monkey Dance in Cairo

My film Monkey Dance will play at the Refugee Film Festival in Cairo, Egypt on Friday, June 19. With Arabic subtitles!

SFAI Vernissage

I was in San Francisco last week for my classmates' MFA show at Fort Mason. It was quite a spectacle, with around 100 artists showing their wares in a huge waterfront warehouse space with ceilings that must have been at least 50 feet high.

JD Beltran wrote a good blog post about the show in the San Francisco Chronicle. One of the pieces I especially enjoyed was Brandon Truscott's orchestrate entropy (pictured above), in which he arrayed parts of a disassembled piano, retired household gadgets, and other detritus of civilization in a plinth formation with a white-shrouded baby doll suspended on an invisible thread from that high ceiling. It's one of those rare pieces that combines a great concept with a very strong technical execution.

MassArt Student Screening May 9

Next Saturday, May 9 at 7pm, students from my Intermediate Video: Style and Practice class at Massachusetts College of Art and Design will be showing their films. Despite having full-time jobs, families, or other commitments, these Continuing Ed students have taken on ambitious projects - so ambitious, actually, that most of them exceed what can be done in one semester's work. So we decided to invite a few friends and hold it as a work-in-progress screening. (The public is welcome if you don't mind films that are still in formation!)

There are intriguing intersections in my students' lives and the themes of their non-fiction films, namely: life-threatening accidents that cause major changes, and women in the second half of life finding new direction.  Plus one piece that defies these two categories: a revelatory "exit interview" of a young white woman finishing a year as a VISTA volunteer in a Chinatown cultural group.

A Media Archaeology of Boston

Tomorrow night at 7pm at the Harvard Film Archive there's going to be a dig into 100 years of cinema representation of Boston - from early silent panoramas of the new subway lines to government films, Hollywood blockbusters, 8mm art pieces, 1950s commercials, and YouTube clips.  I co-curated A Media Archaeology of Boston with Jesse Shapins and Olga Touloumi of Harvard's Graduate School of Design and Ernst Karel of the Film Study Center.  It's the opening event of Cambridge Talks, an annual symposium that brings together scholars in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning.  This year's symposium theme is "Mediated Space."

Still a Monkey Dancer

My family and I went to the Angkor Dance Troupe's annual fundraiser last weekend, and I was happy to catch up with all three young people featured in my film Monkey Dance - Linda Sou, Sochenda Uch, and Samnang Hor.  All three are living in Lowell after finishing college, and giving back to their community in different ways.

I was especially pleased to see that Linda is now Assistant Artistic Director of the troupe, and Samnang is still dancing swa pol, the monkey dance - along with his new roles as Lowell High School algebra teacher, gymnastic coach, husband, and .... father!  He and his wife had a baby girl five months ago.  Congratulations to their family!

LOCALITY Show in San Francisco April 2-16

My short video 25th & Mission will be in a group show called Locality at the Mission Arts Center, 2183 Mission Street (between 17th & 18th), San Francisco. The opening party is April 2, 8-11pm, and the closing party is April 16, 8-11pm. Unfortunately I won't be there personally.

I made the seven-minute video, which will play in a loop on a monitor, during my first summer of three living in the Bay Area. The piece was inspired by my family's three-week stay at a friend's studio apartment (international tango artist Hung-yut Chen).

What begins as abstract fields of color gradually emerges to be a portrait of four tiny shops in a block of San Francisco’s Mission district. They are as diverse as the community around them: a Chinese-run laundry, a Salvadoran hair salon, a hipster tattoo parlor, an art gallery. As the camera hovers inches from its subjects, we realize that the seemingly disparate shops are linked not only by their location but also by their inhabitants’ loving attention to the beautification of the varied surfaces they work with.

Making Your Media Matter conference

I was in DC last week for the annual Making Your Media Matter conference hosted by AU's Center for Social Media. It was my first experience sitting in an audience of hundreds of people with laptops open, all surfing the web, emailing, and tweeting reports about the conference as it happened.

George Stoney (above), 87 years old and still making films, spoke on ethics in social issue film.  It was also great hearing from Alice Myatt from Grantmakers in Film & Electronic Media about their amazing online database to help connect film projects with funders.

Most of the talk was about outreach for social documentaries. Ages ago, filmmakers would make a film THEN think about its audience.  In the past ten years or so, we've learned that it's good to start your outreach as you are making the film. But one of the big messages of this conference was that now you should start building the audience for your film before you even shoot a frame. Facebook, Twitter, and Blog away!