Boston Asian American Film Festival

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)

closeness

2015 | 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.”

leadway

2014 | USA | 10 mins | Documentary
Directed by Robbie Fisher and Dudley Olssen

Violence can enter into our lives unannounced and without regard for those we love. How we respond is something we control.

Set in a small town in the rural Mississippi Delta, this short film traces the emotional journey of Cindi Quong Lofton, a Chinese American woman, as she deals with the violent death of her father, an iconic figure in the community known simply by the name of his store – Leadway. For generations, Cindi’s family, like other Chinese families in the region, operated a grocery store providing basic necessities in a mostly-poor community. The death of Cindi’s father rips apart her world, and leaves an indelible mark on her small town, but she responds in a way that shows both courage and resilience, and binds her even more closely to her struggling community. Cindi meets a 14-year-old boy named Willie and commits herself to making sure his life turns out differently from so many of the young people around him.

With the exception of some preliminary research and scouting, this film was shot and produced in six days in Shaw, Greenville, and Jackson, Mississippi. Co-Directors Robbie Fisher and Dudley Olsson undertook this project as part of an independent “Barefoot Workshop” training, under the mentorship of Chandler Griffin and Alison Fast. Fisher and Olsson grew up together in Greenville and had long wanted to work together on a film project in Mississippi. When they met Cindi and heard her story, they knew it needed to be told.

Directors' Bios:
ROBBIE FISHER is a film producer and attorney living and working in Jackson, Mississippi. Fisher has produced several award-winning documentaries including Boogaloo & Eden: Sustaining the Sound; The Gulf Islands: Mississippi's Wilderness Shore; and A Mississippi Love Story. She has produced several short narrative films including Going Toward Love, Headrush, and a series of four short films, collectively entitled Sequence. Robbie has also produced commercials and worked on feature films in Mississippi. Leadway is the first film Robbie has worked on as Director and Cinematographer.

DUDLEY PERCY OLSSON lives with her husband and two college-age daughters in the small town of West Point, Virginia. She has worked as a journalist and public health researcher, and for the past ten years has served on her town’s School Board. Dudley is interested in how stories hold our attention and shape our thinking. She recently completed a series of facilitator trainings through the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, and organized a digital storytelling workshop in her community focusing on civil and human rights. She holds a master’s in journalism from Columbia University. Leadway is her first full-fledged venture into filmmaking.

giap's last day at the ironing board factory

2014 | 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 Cleveland

2014 | 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:
the japanese war brides

2015 | USA | 26 mins | Documentary
Directed by Lucy Craft, Kathryn Tolbert and Karen Kasmauski

Despite lingering wartime enmity, tens of thousands of Japanese wives -- the biggest influx of Asian women in U.S. history -- crossed the Pacific. They began new lives in difficult and to them mysterious circumstances, scattered across the country in places where they were often the first Japanese ever seen. What was it like to abandon family, friends and country, and marry a former enemy? Even for those whose choice of spouse proved to be a tragic mistake, there was no turning back. Many in Japan viewed them as social outcasts and even today the words "war bride" in Japanese carry such a stigma -- of bar girls, even prostitution -- that people don't like to say them. Now these women are in their 80s. This is their story, of lives shaped by one irrevocable decision.

Directors' Bio:
LUCY CRAFT is a freelance broadcast reporter and producer based in Tokyo, but hails from Washington, D.C. Piqued by how her Japanese mother ended up with a Jewish guy from the Bronx, she eventually drifted to Tokyo, even settling in mom’s old neighborhood of Suginami. Lucy used to say it was in search of roots, but working on this war bride documentary has convinced her it’s more about a shared DNA for somewhat reckless adventure and wanderlust.

Born on a U.S. Naval base in Yokosuka, Japan, KAREN KASMAUSKI is the daughter of Steve, a career sailor who served in three wars, and Emiko, who still lives near the base in Norfolk, Va. Inspired by her father’s love of photography, Karen spent most of her career as a contract photographer at National Geographic, where she broke new ground covering fields from medicine to migration. Her work has taken her to every continent except Antarctica. This documentary is an attempt to better understand a mother who often seemed more like a neighbor than family.

KATHRYN TOLBERT has worked for The Associated Press, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post as a reporter and editor. When she worked for the AP in Tokyo, and later for The Washington Post's Tokyo Bureau, she often wrote about Japanese women. The war bride story is one she has known she should tell, but looking into the lives of others comes more naturally than delving into her own mother's. Working with Lucy, Karen and the Blue Chalk team has made it possible to finally tell her story.

In order to produce this film we have partnered with Blue Chalk Media, a digital media company founded by people who believe in the power of nonfiction visual storytelling. It is headquartered in Brooklyn, NY, and has a West Coast office in Portland, OR, as well. With roots in photojournalism, documentary film, cable television and digital communications, the Blue Chalk team is equipped to serve third-party clients and partners as well as to publish independently.

El chino

2014 | 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.