Ten UCI Film & Media Studies majors, Leatrice Ching, Yanit Mehta, Christopher Nguyen, Shirley Nieto, Vito Perez, Altair Pérez Caesar, Alexis Sii, Tracey Tran, Nicky Wan, and Sabrina Yunus, visited the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival in late April with Desha Dauchan, lecturer in Film & Media Studies, and Fatimah Tobing Rony, associate professor of Film and Media Studies at UCI. Dr. Rony describes the experience below:
“We first met at the Downtown Independent Theater in downtown LA to see an engaging program of short films called “Cine Diorama,” with films ranging from documentary shorts set all over the world exploring memory and place, including one following two different children in China, another funny and poignant piece on Filipina nurses, one in which a daughter talks to her mother frankly about growing up the only child of a single mother, and another on a longtime SF Chinatown resident who creates magical miniatures of the past. The second program included a screening of “Motherland” by Ramona Diaz, a film which was screened at the Berlin Film Festival, and was a Sundance award-winning observational documentary taking us into a maternity hospital in the Philippines with portraits of several of the patients who are all very poor and some very young. We then walked to Little Tokyo and the Japanese American Museum to watch the Virtual Reality animation of “Bronzeville.” The final program was another documentary: “Mele Murals,” directed by Tad Nakamura, which looked at how indigenous Hawaiians are using graffiti and murals to remember and create stories around their history. We ended the visit with dinner at an old-time hangout, Mitsuru Grill. We met many filmmakers, including all of those in the programs we watched, as well as the Executive Director of Visual Communications Francis Cullado, and Festival Co-Director, David Magdael.
Students told us that they were really engaged by the films, inspired to make films, and were happy to learn about this festival, which supports film about and by Asian and Asian Pacific American directors.