Sunday, March 06, 2005

Cinequest & NFAA

My brother Will is an actor. One of his recent gigs was doing the narration on an animated short film called Trans, which got into the Cinequest San Jose Film Festival. So I went down to San Jose to see it. It was in Short Film Program 7 and I was really impressed with the whole selection of films.

My favorites were in the very first group. There were three from the USC film school and one from Florida State.

The Arsonist was very stylish and had a male main character who would have been extremely hot had he not also been so arrogant. But I'm sure that was the point.

Miracle Mile was very sweet. It is about a Korean-American taxi driver, one of whose fares is a woman from Korea who's searching for her long-lost brother who was adopted by Americans.

Pretty Dead Girl was a Broadway musical short film. It was like Romeo and Juliet, if Romeo had worked in the morgue and looked for lovers among the dead, and if Juliet was willing to kill herself to become his girlfriend. It was dark, disturbing, and very funny.

Fields of Mudan blew me away. It is a very powerful film about the plight of children who are enslaved. I'm sure it will be on film festivals all over the place and you should be sure to see it.
The filmmakers were there for Q&A and it turns out all of them are working on feature-length versions of their shorts, except for Pretty Dead Girl. The director said he had to get away from the subject matter. :)

And Trans was cool too. Will says it's been expanded and is now twice as long as when it first screened at the De Anza Film Festival.

In other very good news, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts has awarded me an Astral Career Grant to help with travel expenses for my upcoming trip to Memphis, where I'll give a performance art workshop at the Flute Festival Mid-South.