shorts: home in america
Sunday, October 25, 2015, 1:00 PM
Bright Family Screening Room, The Paramount Center
559 Washington Street, Boston MA
(T: Park Street, Downtown Crossing, or Boylston)
Closeness | Leadway | Giap's Last Day at the Ironing Board Factory | Finding Cleveland | Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides | El Chino
Followed by Q&A with Director Max Esposito and Producers Saade Barber and Jonathan Wong (El Chino),
Directors Lucy Craft and Kathryn Tolbert (Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight)
Bright Family Screening Room, The Paramount Center
559 Washington Street, Boston MA
(T: Park Street, Downtown Crossing, or Boylston)
Closeness | Leadway | Giap's Last Day at the Ironing Board Factory | Finding Cleveland | Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides | El Chino
Followed by Q&A with Director Max Esposito and Producers Saade Barber and Jonathan Wong (El Chino),
Directors Lucy Craft and Kathryn Tolbert (Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight)
closeness2015 | USA | 7 mins | Documentary
Directed by Thuan Hien Thuan Hien’s film (2015 Short Waves Winner) is a short documentary that explores the interconnectedness and complexity of his ‘mother and son’ relationship. That closeness has nothing to do with distance and the one thing that binds them is a shared refugee experience. As filmmaker Hien quotes, “It is important that these stories of the Vietnamese refugee people do not die and go unheard; their legacy must be heard.” |
giap's last day at the ironing board factory2014 | USA | 26 mins | Documentary
Directed by Tony Nguyen In 1975, a seven-months pregnant Vietnamese refugee, Giap, escapes Saigon in a boat and, within weeks, finds herself working on an assembly line in Seymour, Indiana. 35 years later, her aspiring filmmaker son, Tony, decides to document her final day of work at the last ironing board factory in America. It turns into a painful, but loving journey. Director's Bio: TONY NGUYEN made his directorial debut with ENFORCING THE SILENCE (2011), an hour-long documentary that the LA Times called “an uplifting portrait” of slain journalist Lam Duong. He recently completed GIAP’S LAST DAY AT THE IRONING BOARD FACTORY (2014), winner of the Loni Ding Award for Social Justice Documentary. A collaboration with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki, GIAP’S LAST DAY is the first of an autobiographical film series that provides a fresh take on the refugee experience in America. Based in Oakland, California, Nguyen is also a consulting producer for a forthcoming PBS Frontline documentary about the unsolved murders of Vietnamese journalists on US soil. |
Finding Cleveland2014 | USA| 11 mins | Documentary
Directed by Larissa Lam Finding Cleveland is a documentary short film that follows Charles Chiu and his family on an emotional journey as they take a trip to Cleveland, Mississippi to visit the gravesite of Charles’ father, KC Lou. In less than 48 hours, Charles has many surprising encounters with the local townspeople, who help fill in some blanks about the father he never knew. He also learns of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a discriminatory law against Chinese immigrants and the struggles his father faced in a pre-civil rights era. Director's Bio: LARISSA LAM makes her directorial debut with Finding Cleveland but is no stranger to producing and composing. She has produced TV shows such as Top 3 for JUCE TV, music videos and other short form videos such as “A Day in the Life of an Engineer” for the White House’s Stay With It campaign. She has written & produced music for TV (The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Oz, E!, TLC), film (Dead Man Down, Gone) and video games (Konami, Square Enix). Lam began her career as the Chief Financial Officer of NSOUL Records. She has toured the U.S. & Asia as a recording artist and has been a keynote speaker at numerous universities such as Yale, UCLA and University of North Carolina. Her current projects include her fourth solo EDM, Soul & Pop influenced album, Love and Discovery, released in June 2015. She is also the host of a new advice radio show for young adults,UTalk Radio. She is a native of Diamond Bar, CA and graduated UCLA with a degree in Business Economics. |
fall seven times, get up eight:
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El chino2014 | USA| 10 mins | Documentary
Directed by Max Esposito Jon "El Chino" Wong would be next up in the four-generation Chinese lineage of Sun Sun Co., the oldest grocery store and wholesaler in Boston's Chinatown. A lifetime of working for his father and uncle - endlessly stacking boxes and loading trucks while doing deliveries around New England - has worn on him and he breaks away from the family business to create a career shaping surfboards. However, when his father is diagnosed with liver cancer, the family business once again falls on his shoulders and the future of the passion driven business he's spent years building becomes tragically uncertain. Director's Bio: El Chino is the collaborative effort of producers SAADE BARBAR, MAX ESPOSITO and JONATHON WONG. In 2006 through 2009, Barbar and Esposito attended Boston University together where they dabbled in short films and photo essays on New England surfing, with Barbar acting as producer and Esposito as cameraman and editor. Barbar's effervescent enthusiasm for the outdoors has brought him a wealth of understanding and access to great surf stories, in particular meeting Jonathan Wong, a New England surfboard shaper and heir to the oldest grocery store in Chinatown. Wong's persistence and work ethic kept motivation going for El Chino while Esposito and Barbar spent endless mornings and evenings crafting the film around their day-jobs: Barbar a sales team lead at a large travel website and Esposito a freelance filmmaker. |