2015 in Pictures

in 2015 I...

Rang in the new year with good friends and a tiny dance party.

Ate quinoa for breakfast over the Pacific Ocean.

Completed a year long project: a documentary that tells the story of an affordable housing nonprofit.

Posed nude in the name of art!

Worked with Al Jazeera Plus, sharing a story of a good friend and her bold way of living.

Brought my left brain to post production teams on a few better known projects:

  

                   

Spent my birthday drinking port from a plastic martini glass on the beach.

Worked with my mom professionally.

Worked on the early stages of a documentary about people who believe they are God.

Fell in love with theatre again. Watched some fucking talented brave actors and a director take risks and have fun

Made lots of fake whiskey. Took a photo with Cher.

Fell in love with some big dogs (a palm reader once told me i was a healer of large animals in a past life). I need one.

Explored a tid bit of the ginormous state of Alaska.

Rode through three continental divides, caught a salmon, stood in a glacier.

Rode a moped 5 miles to my job in Alaska.

 (Later found out the muffler was broken that whole time. Got yelled at once for unknowingly having the blinker on too long "Learn how to drive or don't drive at all young lady!")

Taught myself how to teach theatre.

 ...And learned even more from teaching 30 7-12 year olds.

Witnessed a friend since before shirts were necessary start a new chapter.

  

 Directed Aladdin the play!!! It ended in 3 sold out shows.

...Starring 28 12-18 year olds. We borrowed some inspiration from the well known version, and added some of our own flair.

Glamped 2 miles remote.

Lived at three different Los Angeles addresses.

Had Kardashian hair for a day.

Edited a virtual reality video.

Bought a new camera and started learning how to use it.

Sat at a board room table and pitched a documentary project I believe in (fingers crossed..)

Learned the vital Importance of Being Earnest.

Drove to Mexico with this one.

Made a personal story reel of past projects.


Was inspired by: The Revenant, The Big Short, True Detective, Transparent, Bloodline, Chef's Table, Iris, The Act of Kiling, Transparent, Straight Outta Compton, Aziz Ansari, The Measure of All Things, Sam Green's Louis Armstrong Pop Up Magazine piece, Selma.

Swam lots of laps, started meditating, felt freedom on skis again,

 and ended the year with good friends and a tiny dance party.

Werner Herzog in 3D: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

I have been delaying it long enough, it's time to write about experiencing Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams Monday night. Not that I have much to say besides SEE IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. Let the film envelop you and enjoy the ride.

I won't be a fool and spoil for you or try describe the near out of body experience in too many words. Here are just a few thoughts:

As she introduced the film festival programmer Rachel Rosen said, "This film reminds us how extraordinarily wonderful and mysterious of a world it is." The crowd clapped when "Werner Herzog" came up on the screen. These viewers, who got their tickets far in advance and waited in a long line are no strangers to the wonder of Herzog.

A note on 3D: I realized after watching and being so moved by the sensual nature of the 3D camera that I have never seen a 3D live action film before. I don't consider Avatar live action because it is told through so many special effects, same with Tron, and besides that all I have seen in 3D is Alice in Wonderland (underwhelming, not filmed in 3D but rather a 2D-3D conversion), Toy Story 3 (Yay of course), and Coraline (Yay of course) but Herzog's was the first live action without major special effects. Also it is the very first documentary filmed in 3D, and Herzog [who I consider of the next level of human development] must be the first to have used the 3D camera as such a natural part of his filmmaking. The well written SFIFF54 program comments on the subject best. "Who better to adopt the form than Werner Herzog, our veteran guide to landscapes and mindscapes dislocative yet immersive? Eternally attracted to the spectacular, mystic and strange, he’s forever plunging head-first into exotica his bemused point-of-view renders gently inviting. There’s scarcely a Herzog feature...whose outré content, personalities and imagery wouldn’t make perfect sense in the stereoscopic form."

Since the caves that Werner and the 3D camera show us in this story were discovered in 1994 after being covered by limestone in a massive landslide, we witness the 32,000 year-old paintings inside as "a frozen flesh of a moment in time...they created the perfect time capsule." Adding to the mystery, the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc caverns are now locked by a steel door. No visitors allowed besides the occasional researcher granted access by the French Ministry of Culture.

A whole supporting cast and crew of interesting academics and scientists play supporting roles here, including a "Master Perfumer" and an "Experimental Archeologist." Many of them best explain the experience of being in the caves on more spiritual/emotional terms than logical, and that's really what this film is about. One man speaks to the experience of being in the caves as emotional shock. After coming out he needed days and weeks to relax and absorb the experience. "I am a scientist but I am human too," he says when describing coming out with a "powerful feeling of understanding things." Another expert ties the experience of the cave paintings to his opinion that human described as homosapien is wrong and that the descriptive word should be homospiritual instead.

And if we are just speaking logically, what is it about being in the caves, among the paintings? Well, has anything so old, in such fine, fresh form has ever been experienced. No. Part of the powerful feeling must also come from the fact that very few people have witnessed them. And the drawings represent the "invention of the figuration of things," from a previously oral culture.


Alas I fear I've said too much.
Heavier applause this time at the end: "Written, narrated, and directed by Werner Herzog." Im not sure I have ever felt such depth of feeling at the sight of a byline before.

Children of the Princess of Cleves at SFIFF54

Monday at the San Francisco International I saw the North American premiere of documentary Children of the Princess of Cleves, by French neuroscientist turned filmmaker Regis Sauder.


Cleves portrays students of a high school literature class in Marseilles who are reading and studying the 17th century French novel La Princesse de Cleves. The first thing I like about this documentary is how relatable it is: most of us can remember back to highschool required reading. We follow along as the students read and study the book while dually we are woven into their personal lives: they experience large and meaningful feelings of love and heartache, angst, and excitment that reflect the themes they are reading in the book. And Sauder does an excellent job weaving, I found it a very powerful documentary in large part because of the filmmaking. The high school characters in the documentary sometimes act out scenes from the book, sometimes voice the scenes to the camera, then dialog of them talking about their own lives and feelings is voiced-over footage of them in their daily lives, that is often very close up shots on their young acne-d faces (which I especially noticed since I got there late and had to sit in the 3rd row...) The tight, personal shots, and the drama of the fiction they're reading make for a nuanced and interesting twist on documentary.

*This is also posted over at my fest21 film blog