Doc Star of the Month: Harry Chuck, 'Chinatown Rising'

For over four decades, 20,000 feet of 16mm-shot film sat untouched in the San Francisco home of lifetime Chinatown resident Reverend Harry Chuck. The footage was supposed to serve as the basis for Chuck’s sweeping graduate thesis, “Chinatown San Francisco: A Community in Transition.” But then life invariably got in the way, and the epic cinematic history of one marginalized community’s generational struggles—‘60s-radicalized youth vs. their “keep your head down” elders raised under the threat of the Chinese Exclusion Act—was never completed. Until now. With the help of son/co-director and producer Josh Chuck (himself a longtime Chinatown-focused filmmaker, fundraiser and youth worker), Harry’s personal and political history is now set to see the public light on May 26 as part of World Channel’s Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPIHM) programming. The father-son duo’s America ReFramed doc Chinatown Rising features enlightening contemporary interviews with the era’s prominent activists (as well as an elder), juxtaposed with the treasure trove of footage. All insightfully narrated, both onscreen and in VO, by the now-octogenarian, first-time feature filmmaker himself. Documentary is honored that the former Youth Director and later Executive Director of Cameron House (an organization founded “to build strength and resilience through family-centered programs” for San Francisco's Chinese community), co-founder of the Chinatown Coalition for Better Housing, onetime member of both the Public Housing Authority and Juvenile Justice Commission in San Francisco—not to mention one of the first Asian American religious leaders to advocate for marriage equality—found time in his still-active schedule to serve as May’s Doc Star of the Month.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“The Way the Janes Approached This, One Woman at a Time, Helped 11,000 Women Get Safe Abortion Care”: Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes on their Human Rights Watch Film Festival closing night doc The Janes

The Janes, which closes this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival in-person May 26, followed by an HBO premiere June 8, is one woefully prescient walk down pre-Roe memory lane. Directed by Academy Award nominee Tia Lessin (Trouble the Water, which also nabbed the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Gotham Independent Film Award back in 2008) and Emmy nominee Emma Pildes (Spielberg, which the debut director likewise produced for HBO), the doc tells the illicit tale of the titular underground network of college-age activists who defied the law (and male expectations) to provide women in Chicago with safe, shame-free abortions. Until, perhaps inevitably, they got busted in a headline-grabbing raid (by the homicide arm of the CPD no less). And then, in the most Hollywood of twists, found the tide of history that they’d helped turn was actually on their side. Pildes and Lessin (whose accolade-laden bio also includes “two Emmy nominations, one arrest, and a lifetime ban from Disneyland” for the late-90s TV series The Awful Truth) found time just prior to their doc’s Human Rights Film Festival launch to give us the scoop on combining contemporary interviews with archival footage from a clandestine past; resulting in an unnerving portrait of a possibly hellish future (at least, as usual, for the young, BIPOC and poor). (The Human Rights Watch Film Festival streams nationwide May 20-26 at The IFC Center. All ticket purchases help subsidize the cost of free tickets – set aside on a first come first-served basis – as HRWFF does “not want the cost of entry to be a barrier for participation in the festival.”)

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

State-conjured terrorism: The New Greatness Case

RUSSIA: An ordinary Russian teenager was arrested and incarcerated on charges of extremism. Three years later, the fight for her innocence continues. A sense of dread and urgency hangs over Anna Shishova-Bogolubova’s nail-biting The New Greatness Case, which won the IDFA Forum Award for Best Rough Cut last November and is set to world premiere at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in NYC (May 20-26). And that includes the doc’s production along with its storyline. The cut I saw the week before the film’s debut (with temp music and VO) appeared more than ready for primetime but was also a sign of the high stakes at play. With the recent invasion of Ukraine, the tale of Anya, an ordinary teenage girl in Moscow before she was abruptly arrested and jailed for attempting to bring down the Putin regime, is as terrifyingly timely as it is patently ridiculous. Add to this the fact that the Russian director and her cinematic story are now a bit too close for comfort, as Shishova-Bogolubova initially met her protagonists while making a video for the Russian human rights organization Memorial – closed and liquidated just last month. The noose is tightening for all of Russia, to say the least.

To read the rest of my essay visit Modern Times Review.

True Romance: Kamikaze Hearts

Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts, originally released in 1986 and now set to screen in a new 2K restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive (May 13 in NYC at BAM and May 20 in LA at Alamo Drafthouse with a nationwide rollout to follow), is a mesmerizing time capsule of the San Francisco porn industry in the 80s, told through the toxic romance of two star-crossed lesbian lovers. It was an era defined by a Hollywood-conjured president, busily selling trickle-down snake oil to the masses while blithely ignoring a fast-moving epidemic (that would go on to kill well over 30 million). None of which is explicitly addressed in Kamikaze Hearts, but rather looms like a boom mic hovering from above offscreen.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

“We’re All Pornographers Now”: Juliet Bashore on Her 2K-Restored Kamikaze Hearts

Any director whose bio includes being fired from “an animated children’s film for Miramax titled The Great North Pole Elf Strike for portraying Santa’s elves as gay” is my kind of filmmaker. And Juliet Bashore, of the aforementioned dismissal, also has the added distinction of being the force behind the prescient time capsule of the pre-gentrified San Francisco sex industry, Kamikaze Hearts (1986). That “fictionalized documentary” (“hybrid” was a term yet to be coined) depicted the doomed relationship between lovestruck Tigr (also a producer on the film) and the object of her adoration, gender fluid “(nonbinary” was likewise not yet coined) porn star Sharon Mitchell, aka “Mitch.” It’s a film that certainly defied expectations back then — the period’s average mainstream movie contained hotter sex scenes — as well as now, with the riveting psychodrama’s upcoming rerelease in a 2K restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. So to learn all about the journey from underground to establishment, Filmmaker reached out to the unconventional film artist (and VR pioneer) a week before, via Kino Lorber, the doc’s nationwide rollout, starting with a May 13th NYC debut at BAM and May 20th in LA at Alamo Drafthouse.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Blindspots: Michael Winterbottom’s ‘Dark Matter: Independent Filmmaking in the 21st Century’

VIEWS: Beginning with a flawed premise, British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom's book of interviews does not provide the full picture. As a longtime fan of Michael Winterbottom, I looked forward to finally taking some spring break time to read Dark Matter: Independent Filmmaking in the 21st Century (published by Bloomsbury last October), the British director’s survey of the state of his country’s cinema through interviews with 15 of the best in the business working (though not as much as Winterbottom would like) today. It seemed like a great idea in theory. Who better than Winterbottom – a film artist of boundless curiosity and seamless flexibility – to probe the creative minds of everyone from Ken Loach, Danny Boyle and Mike Leigh, to Steve McQueen, Asif Kapadia and Lynne Ramsay? How many other directors in the UK (or elsewhere for that matter) can go from Manchester music scene (24 Hour Party People), to Gitmo detention camp (The Road to Guantanamo), to 50s noir (The Killer Inside Me), to comedic series (The Trip and its Coogan-kooky offshoots)? And that’s just a handful of films in a 30-plus oeuvre spread out over nearly three decades. Indeed, Winterbottom unquestionably is that rare risk-taking British gentleman seemingly unafraid to fail. (See – or rather don’t see – 2004’s sexually explicit misstep 9 Songs. 24% on Rotten Tomatoes. Ouch.) Which is a longwinded way of saying that sometimes a great idea, in theory, can quite unexpectedly go very very wrong.

To find out why visit Modern Times Review.

Erotic Auteur Jennifer Lyon Bell on SMUT, TEDx Talks and CineKink NYC

In the world of erotic cinema, veteran indie filmmaker Jennifer Lyon Bell is a (non-nuclear) household name. An early member of both the feminist porn and ethical porn movements, the director-producer — and curator, writer and teacher — has for over a decade and a half been on a transatlantic mission to spread the sex-positive word. And now the Amsterdam-based expat and founder of Blue Artichoke Films will be Zooming in to this year’s virtual CineKink (May 4-8 with a week of encores to follow) on the afternoon of May 8 to present “From Fantasy To Film: Design Your Own Erotic Movie,” a “two-hour virtual workshop, designed to put you in touch with your own creative desires, and help you plan the one perfect sexy film you’d make if money and reality were no object!” (Yes, dream big but fantasize bigger.) Which gave Filmmaker the perfect excuse to check back in with the ridiculously busy Bell to find out what she’s been up to since last penning one of our top posts of 2021.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“We All Have our Unique Biologies, a Variety of Differences”: Phyllis Ellis on her Hot Docs-Debuting Category: Woman

Middle-distance runner Caster Semenya has won two Olympic gold medals and three World Championships in the women’s 800-meter competition. But no amount of endurance training could have prepared this South African Olympian for the long legal battle (a dozen years and counting) sparked by that very first 2009 World Championship victory. While other winning athletes were celebrating in Berlin, this Black woman from the Global South was undergoing “sex testing,” her right to even compete being thrown into question by a sports governing body made up almost wholly of white European men. But optics be damned. In the end, the International Amateur Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) decided that “identified” female athletes (which creepily reads like a euphemism for “nonwhite”) would have to bring down their testosterone levels if they wanted to keep racing. In other words, undergo medically unnecessary procedures on their healthy bodies. That’s supposedly to protect the sanctity of the sport and ensure “fair play,” although, of course, to protect from whom and ensure for whom is the elephant-size question that still lingers like the stench of a locker room. Fortunately, Canadian filmmaker (and writer, actor and producer) Phyllis Ellis has decided to tackle this question head on. With Category: Woman Ellis, an Olympian herself, follows four female champions directly affected by this human rights-violating ruling. (Unsurprisingly all are women of color from the Global South, three from Africa and one from India.) While also tracing the misogynistic history of policing women’s bodies under the flimsy fig leaf of defending the honor of the fairer sex. Filmmaker caught up with the veteran Hot Docs director (2019’s Toxic Beauty) just after the film’s May 2nd world premiere in the Persister program of this year’s edition. (Category: Woman continues to stream virtually for the duration of the fest through Hot Docs at Home, though geo-blocked to Canada.)

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“We Were Re-Traumatized by Working with the State.”: Jasmín Mara López on Her Hot Docs-debuting Silent Beauty

Jasmín Mara López is a journalist, audio producer, and nonfiction filmmaker whose 2015 audio doc Deadly Divide: Migrant Death on the Border received the Society of Professional Journalists’ Excellence in Journalism Award. But the Los Angeles and New Orleans-based director-producer, an immigrant rights advocate with family ties to Mexico, is also a victim of trauma herself. And even more tragically, not at the hands of any faceless government bureaucracy but by those who purport to love her the most. It’s a harrowing tale, one López heroically, and with brutal honesty, dives headfirst into in her Hot Docs world-premiering Silent Beauty. The courageously intimate film explores the sexual abuse, both perpetrated and experienced by generations of her own family, and the culture of silence she’s now intent on taking a sledgehammer to. Starting, remarkably, with herself. Determined to name and shame her Baptist minister grandfather, López embarks on a surprising spiritual and physical journey, connecting and reconnecting with far too many female relatives with accounts painfully similar to her own. Filmmaker caught up with the first-time filmmaker to find out why she decided to combine frank conversations with a trove of family movies (from the archive of her abuser no less) – exposing herself so vulnerably in the process. But also how she managed to sift through the fragments of her shattered childhood, and reshape those pieces into one joyful feature-length mosaic. Silent Beauty screens Hot Docs theatrically May 3 and May 7, and virtually May 4-8 (geo-blocked to Canada).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.