Page One

Daily Planet Correspondent 

The Women of Color Video and Film Festival, by it very name, proclaims both a narrowed focus and a wide range of subjects. African, Asian, Native American, Mexican find commonality in gender. 

The films and videos of the festival, screening this week and next at the Pacific Film Archive, were chosen by a group of students at Cal as part of a curatorial class, called – of course – the Women of Color Film Project. The undergrads sought well-regarded film artists and combed through submissions from unproven talent to select the short and feature-length works. 

And the criteria for selection? “It’s really hard to put into words, but the main criteria is diversity,” said Mona Atia, who spearheads the festival alongside co-curator Kristina Hsu. 

“Diversity,” being a loaded term in this town, socio-politically speaking, would be better spent describing the stylistic choices of the films and videos over their content. 

“Primarily, we looked for avant-garde, documentary, and narrative mixed together,” said Atia, “secondary was a wide plethora of minorities.” 

The short films in tonight’s program play with a variety of aesthetic approaches to women’s relations to bodies and culture. “Little Thunder,” a seven-minute video by UC senior Laura Merians and SFSU student Tita Poe, uses rough film footage (what appears to be home movie, Super-8 stock) to document a 20-year-old Native American woman who became unexpectedly pregnant during a religious ceremony. Her plan to raise her child outside the Western cultural hegemony is thwarted when medical complications disallow the natural birthing and child rearing she had envisioned. 

Next to that, in contrast, is “Industrial Bodies,” a highly processed 15-minute video pastiche of anatomy, cellular division, and blood movement with a droning synthesized soundtrack by San Francisco-based filmmaker Khamsea Hoa Bristol. Its organic and graceful vermeer points to a vague idea of human divination rooted in the mechanics of biology, and moves toward an ode to a graceful death as Bristol morphs her film into a cinematic letter to her dying grandfather in Vietnam. 

In a lighter tone, but with no less weighty subject, is Camille Billops’ “Take Your Bags,” in which an account of African cultural baggage – stolen by slave traders and later transposed onto European modernist art – is told in an informal, familiar storytelling style. A woman is warmly encouraging a young boy to consider African iconography in European art (all of which is unseen, off-camera), and the child is alternately yawning and playing with his toy VW Bug. Ultimately, this is an affectionate take on cultural cross-pollination, ending with the child’s rendition of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” 

The personal documentary short, a mainstay form for minority and marginalized filmmakers, are plentiful. There are plenty of lousy ones and some extraordinary ones. Atia said they fell into her lap, but the really good work had to be coaxed from established artists who don’t send their films to every call for submissions. 

Tonight’s program of shorts is accompanied by a ringer: an hour-long feature documentary “Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis @ 100.” Winner of the Best Documentary award at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, it is a portrait of purportedly the oldest “out” African-American lesbian (Ruth Ellis, 100 years old) who dances women 70 years younger under the table. 

To listen to her breezy recollections of her pursuit of pleasure and compassion through the turbulent 20th century, you’d think it was one long party: She graduated from high school, she owned a print shop, she opened her house as a gay meeting place on weekends. Filmmaker Yvonne Welbon produces on-screen statistics and historical facts to put Ruth’s life in context – to acknowledge the bravery and good humor Ruth steeled herself with in order to live joyfully with the formidable social odds of poverty, race, gender and sexuality. 

“Living with Pride” and the shorts play tonight at the PFA at 7:30. The Women of Color Video and Film Festival continues next Tuesday at the PFA with a narrative feature, Zeinabu Irene Davis’ “Compensation,” which, according to the program notes, is “a story of love between and deaf woman and a hearing man.” Its 7:30 p.m. screening will be subtitled and interpreted with sign language. 

For program and ticket information call the Pacific Film Archive at 510-642-5249.