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This year's Berkeley Video Film Festival (produced by East Bay Media Center) showcased fifty-three films in three days, or seventeen films a day. What to do? Pick the best Films and tell you how to get them as DVD's. I'm focussing on my three favorites. 

"ENFORCING THE SILENCE" 

I was not the only one to be mind-blown by Tony Nguyen's "Enforcing the Silence," (59 minutes), a reverential and shocking account of the political assassination in the U.S., of Vietnamese activist, Lam Duong, 27, promoting pro-Hanoi views in San Francisco and Oakland's Vietnamese communities dominated by a hatred of Hanoi. There was lots of audience buzz on this film, and one viewer commented that he didn't expect to see anything this gutsy on screen. 

In fact, the film had been shown the night before at a Vietnamese community center in East-Oakland, where the act of viewing the film could have incited threats to the viewers. 

The film was scary and dangerous. Especially to journalists (five other pro-Hanoi journalists were assassinated in the nineties, as well as Lam Duong). Part crime melodrama (the crime was never solved, nor adequately investigated) and police procedural film, the film depicts a lot of bad-cop…bad-cop. 

Depicting mostly San Francisco's Vietnamese, community, many of whom were shown as pro-old guard Vietnam, with connections to the Saigon (U.S. puppet) regime. This does not seem to be a safe organizing neighborhood for a newly minted Oberlin College graduate and his college girlfriend, who apparently believed they were safe among flower children. 

But Lam was gunned down on the streets of a S.F. Vietnamese village with no pity. Voice-over notes that the Vietnamese War will continue to weigh heavy in the hearts and minds of Vietnamese--perhaps forever. 

For availability information: .http://kck.st/eDKx8t 

"NOHO HEWA: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawaii" 

Anne Keala Kelly's film, "Noho Hewa," is even more Raw than "Enforcing the Silence," the Vietnam film. The Vietnam film merely indicts a nameless cadre of Saigon loyalists, trained to kill. Kelly's film takes on the U.S. government, the State of Hawaii, and the U.S. Military. 

And these usual-suspect perps had better watch out. When government officials are confronted by their often moving and eloquent victims (indigenous Hawaiians, who are having their burial sites bull-dozed, while living in squalor and state neglect), the officials get all pissy-faced. 

"Noho Hewa" has a strong voice and that comes from Kelly, herself a native-islander and journalist who covered this story for eleven years. She can occasionally be seen in her film interviewing subjects. For those who think Michael Moore sets up his subjects for cheap-shot scorn, Kelly doesn't have to go that far. The miscreants she selects just seem clueless or down-right ornery. 

Take the case of the state of Hawaii, in which we are given an adventure tour of the other side of paradise. Native islanders evicted from their lands and shoddy apartments into ad hoc squatter encampments, like the one near a sewage dump; the state selling off lands "ceded" to it by the U.S. government, which claims it got the rights from queen Liliʻuokalani, the last queen of the Islands. The queen, who died in 1917, denies it. 

Then there's the aw-shucks case of the Hawaiian Islands dominated by 144 military bases (one-fourth of Oahu's/Honolulu land mass) and installations, many of which encroach on sacred sites of native islanders. According to the film, the military land-grab began in the 1982 and shows no signs of abating. Homelessness among native islanders has tripled in the past three years--a national scandal. 

Hawaii is now so permeated by military haoles--newly arrived white's from the mainland--that when supporters of native islanders hold small, non-violent protests--haoles insult, cuss, and deride them, in some cases saying that "we don't care about the plight of you people," and "you asshole Asians." 

The film is available ($19.99) from www.nohohewa.com--saving the expense of a trip to paradise. 

"CHANGE IN THE WIND" 

I wasn't expecting much from Change in the Wind, although it was produced by Andrew Young. Initially, I didn't get the concept, something about the writer of "Gone With the Wind," and a black college president. Were they lovers? 

Oddly enough the filmmakers play the love angle--with voice-over narrators like Joanne Woodward reciting letters between Gone With the Wind author Margaret ("Peggy") Mitchell and Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays (sixth president Morehouse college) as if they were lovers. Reluctantly, the film makers are forced to admit that the two never met. 

But after you recover from the soap opera and the sappy music, and the corny readings, there's a darned good story here and get this--it's politically incorrect. 

After writing a light hearted column for the Atlanta Journal in the thirties, in which she uses the racial epithet "pickaninny," Margaret Mitchell wrote "Gone With the Wind," an instant best-selling novel, but condemned even in 1936 by the N.A.A.C.P as racist. 

Films like "Change in the Wind" may correct that, along with an understanding of historical anachronism (interpreting older history from a newer perspective). 

In her personal life, Mitchell admired Blacks and wanted to help them advance to full citizenship, even in the racist south. This led to her sponsorship of Morehouse college students (a small liberal arts black college in Georgia), and ultimately funding the medical educations of black doctors. 

Morehouse president, Mays, touts Mitchell as one of the greatest international writers of all time, and by the way, "here at Morehouse College we do not consider Gone With the Wind to be a racist novel." 

Is he right? The film encourages us to reconsider "Gone With the Wind", the novel apart from the movie, which has also been accused of racism. 

Then there's a noirish twist involving Mitchell's personal servant and Hattie McDaniel. Now we've got a chick flick. McDaniel won an oscar for her "mammy" in GWTW, the film; Mitchel was thinking of her servant, Betsy, when she wrote the Mammy character. 

How does Hattie McDaniel get into it? She'd heard through "the grapevine" that Mitchell was doing good things for "our people" and wanted to thank her for that as well as for writing the part that made McDaniel a star (and Oscar-winner). They corresponded for the rest of Mitchell's life--which ended ten years after the premier of the GWTW film in 1938, probably the highest point in Mitchell's career. 

Perhaps Mitchell is one of the greatest writers in the world, as Mays claims (she has a statue and tribute at Morehouse; her home has been restored twice; and she is a best-selling novelist today). And there's all the black doctors she sponsored. 

For DVD availability contact: ANDREWYOUNGfoundation.ORG/Feature-Length-Documentary_c5.htm. 

GWTW fanatics take note.