Grandmother and Me; Kat Cole, 2016, 6min
With her wedding approaching, Kat Cole creates a visual letter to her fiancé’s only living grandparent: his 100-year old grandmother whom she will never meet. In this intimate documentary, Cole exhumes long-kept secrets to capture the complexities of familial love and the subtle effects of transphobia in the home.
An Overpraised Odyssey; Kaixiang Gao, 2015, 6min
In 1995, Chinese director Jeffrey Lau made an action-comedy A Chinese Odyssey, failing to either receive positive reviews or appeal to mainstream audiences, the movie was considered a box office disaster. Yet five years later it generated thousands of internet memes and was considered by the young generation to be one of the best movies China has ever made. What turned the tide and where does the tide go from there?
The Lost Leader; Mark Brecke, 2016, 12min
The Lost Leader is an urbanized history of Somalia’s motion-picture industry uncovered in Mogadishu’s cinemas.
The Only Thing I Need to Know; Zachary Gallagher, 2015, 6 min
There is a tendency for youths, in the midst of their various rebellions and delusions of all encompassing knowledge, to forget that our parents were once like us. Children. This project was an attempt at beginning to understand my mother’s earlier life, back when she was just, “Meg.” However the desire to find this young woman was rooted in more than sheer curiosity. It was an attempt to meet a version of my mother that existed before she was diagnosed with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, an illness that drastically altered the course of her life and it was also an opportunity to begin to understand my growth had been affected by it. It was a chance to ask the questions I have always been trying forget existed.
Liu Wei ; Chieh-Ju Pai, 2016, 11min
Lui Wei was born in 1968, during the time China was in its Cultural Revolution. Her family was seen as anti-revolutionists because her father composed a satirical poem about Mau and Chiang Kai-Shek during the Great Leap Forward(1958-1960). She was abused by other children in school because of her father’s reputation. The only peaceful moment she had was that her mother gave her singing lessons after work. After years of practice, music led her to find her own dignity in her childhood.
916; Shane Watson, 2016, 6min
What happens when your landlord dies? In the Bay Area a greedy new landlord comes about and tries to evict tenants who have lived in their homes for years. In 916, a recent high school graduate tell the story of how her family received an eviction notice for the home she’s lived in for over a decade.
Masochism of the Margins; Cyrus Yoshi Tabar, 2016, 16min
In 1984, experimental filmmakers looking for a venue to share their work founded Artist Television Access in the gritty Mission District of San Francisco. From the beginning filmmaker Craig Baldwin— long-time bastion of underground and experimental film— has put on a weekly show called Other Cinema, featuring marginalized films. Fast forward 31 years later to 2015, the city is rapidly changing and ATA faces eviction. In Masochism of the Margins, Cyrus Yoshi Tabar documents Craig Baldwin as he faces possible eviction from his home of 31 years and struggles to negotiate with the landlord who insists on a 60% rent increase. The film is an intimate look into the life of a man whose everyday existence is threatened by the forces of gentrification and greed. A portrait of Baldwin during a time of uncertainty, Tabar mixes candid interviews and observational footage, immersing viewers in the historic space of ATA and Craig’s basement studio/archive.
Join us for the final film screening of the *Media for Social Change* class at the UC Berkeley’s Art Practice Department!