video i Season 13
#1313 - Original Airdate: Mon, April 14 at 11pm
3rd San Francisco Women's Film Festival
Featuring a great collection of films and interviews from the festival.
A SHORT TALE OF XUAN (DIR. TERRIE SAMUNDRA)
A Short Tale of Xuan is a coming of age story about a young Vietnamese girl from an immigrant family. She is a young scavenger, collecting found objects and the stories that they carry. Her imagination blends with reality as she navigates thru the world in between childhood and adulthood. This experimental film consists of both live action and animation combining beautiful cinematography and mixed medium fabric animation sequences. To learn more about this film and the filmmaker, go to: ashorttaleofxuan.com.
Filmmaker Bio
Terrie Samundra is an activist, filmmaker, photographer, and writer working out of the Bay Area. She was raised in a multi-cultural household, growing up in a rural village in India, a small farming town in Missouri, and along the coast of California. Her first film, A Short of Xuan, recently won the 2007 Guttman Award for Best Experimental Narrative. At the 2007 San Francisco Women's Film Festival, the film won the Best Local Voice Award and during pre-production was awarded the 2006 Fotokem Grant. Her experience growing up as a multi-racial child with an immigrant mother informs her work, which revolves around community, in particular multi-cultural issues, gender inequality and children. She is also a mother and her work with children is central to everything she does. Terrie is studying at San Francisco State University, working towards an MFA in Cinema Production.
THE TOUCH (DIR. VANESSA WOODS)
The Touch is a meditation on Anne Sexton's poem of the same name. The film examines melodies within spoken, written and visual language and how they can interact. By juxtaposing text, image and sound, the viewer is asked to contemplate disparate forms of human response and emotion regarding language and imagery. For more information, visit: vanessawoods.com.
Filmmaker Bio
Vanessa Woods graduated with an MFA in film, with honors, from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her artwork and films have been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship for Film from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute's MFA Film Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at the Headland Center for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Woods has produced eight films that have been broadcast nationally and screened internationally, including the Education Channel, the Centre International d'Art (France), The Anthology Film Archives (New York), the Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany) and San Francisco International Film Festival.
BLANK CANVAS (DIR. ASHLEY PHELPS)
This powerful documentary shows honest portraits of women artists in recovery from substance abuse, who have embraced creative sensitivity as a lifeline to pull themselves through. This inspirational documentary reveals a community of artistic support that grows around six women, each on her own transformational journey... a journey that not everyone survives. To learn ore about this film and the filmmaker, go to: halibutgirl.com.
Filmmaker Bio
Ashley Phelps is an artist and documentary filmmaker. Ashley won the Best Emerging Filmmaker Award at the San Francisco Women's Film Festival in 2007 for her documentary Blank Canvas (recipient of the Community Outreach Grant from the Santa Barbara Arts Commission). For many years Ashley has worked as a graphic designer and computer artist for clients including Levi's, Presence and Publicity (Music and Film Promotions) and Protozoa, an innovator in motion capture animation.
