SOOOOO…in a rather unexpected turn of events, san diego black film festival ended up screening an older rough cut of our film — the May 2010 cut we showed at EMP last year. didn’t see that one coming!
despite the challenges, pete, eric and i had a phenomenal time in san diego. as always, the conversation that followed our screening was intense and profound. people were really sinking their teeth in, digging into their own family histories and asking questions that shed new insight on our story.
and we came to realize that the true gift of this film is that it compels people to open up and take a look at their own lives and consider their own family/cultural inheritance and legacy, and the resoundingly universal question at the root of it all–who am i?
together with our friends, april and michael petillo–who drove down from phoenix to join us for the weekend–we considered ways of intentionally creating a space for people to engage in conversation and dig deeper into the issues raised in the film after each screening
more on our film’s emerging grassroots approach to community outreach and engagement to follow…
Jake Fawcett ruminates on the themes in A Lot Like You in his post on Can You Relate, a blog about violence and relationships…
Jake heads up the Fatality Review project at the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Fatality Review convenes community groups to examine events leading up to domestic violence related deaths in Washington State, and make policy recommendations to address gaps in services, practices, training and resources.
A Lot Like You makes festival director Karen Willis’ Top 3 list for must-see films at the upcoming San Diego Black Film Festival…
The huge choices at the festival are all appealing. Ask to pick three must-sees, Willis suggested Dog Jack, in which a Pennsylvania slave boy, accompanied by his dog and the Pennsylvania 102 in an attempt to free his mother and sister from slavery; Holding Back the Dream, the aforementioned documentation of black life in Hawaii from a freed slave to Obama; also, A Lot Like You, where a first-generation filmmaker retraces her roots, sending her to Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Check out Tony Cooper’s article in San Diego.com …and just keep reading to the end. 🙂
“Let us speak the truth,” says the man, smiling at his middle-aged siblings as they sit discussing chilhood on a sheltered porch in Tanzanian. “We are not the disciples of Jesus Christ. We are really wicked and mischievous folks.” But the siblings don’t smile. The truth is hard—harder for them than for their smiling brother, who was the only one sent off to the United States for school, who spends more on lunch than they make in a month, whose American-raised, half-Korean daughter is presently filming their lined, quiet faces in a search for answers of her own. Families are messy and painful, and all that hard, complicated truth is what Eliaichi Kimaro’s autobiographical documentary A Lot Like You strives to unpack (for clarity’s sake: The smiling man is Kimaro’s father, the unsmiling siblings her uncles and aunts). And it succeeds, in a series of sad, cathartic surprises.
Over the lifespan of this project, I’ve struggled repeatedly with how to answer the question, “So… what’s your film about?” My pitch was so far from snappy, and sorely lacking in what my friend Danica would refer to as RAZZamaTAZZ!
But as this film makes its way out into the world, I’m starting to understand its potential appeal. And I think it’s connected to this weird paradox we discovered as we were pouring over the writing–that the more personal we got in our storytelling, the more universal our story became.
The themes and issues that surface throughout our film (multi-cultural families, American Dream, mixed race identities, gender violence, inter-generational trauma…)–these are just the particulars of my own personal journey. (And I see now, this is where my pitch was getting bogged down. Because I was trying to encapsulate all this stuff…)
We’re all complicated, and yet remarkably predictable. These issues we raise in our film are definitely complex and multi-faceted and layered and highly charged. But it all boils down to that one simple question–who am i?
Thank you for showing up so phenomenally for our private screening event on Thursday! We could not have wished for a better turnout or a warmer reception.
And now we’re curious to hear what you thought of the film…
Were there parts that particularly resonated with you?
Did it spark any juicy conversations on the ride home?
Did you have questions that you weren’t able to ask during the Q&A?
If you’ve seen earlier versions, we’d love to hear what you think/how you feel about the choices we made for the final film…
Your reflections/comments/feedback are greatly appreciated! 🙂
Our frickin phenomenal musicman Pete just announced that Puzzletree Music will start accepting pre-orders for the ALLY Soundtrack starting January 11th…just in time for our Seattle screening!! Fantastic!
We’re happy to announce that A Lot Like Youis an official selection of the San Diego Black Film Festival (Jan. 27-30, 2011.) Our film will be screening Friday, Jan. 28 at 7:30 pm. We’re very excited about our primo screening slot, immediately following the festival’s Red Carpet event. Pete, Eric and I look forward to partying it up with our friends in San Diego!!
The San Diego Black Film Festival was established in 2003 and is hosted each year by the San Diego Black Film Foundation. The San Diego Black Film Foundation is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of African American and African Diaspora cinema as well as the education of media arts. Held each year in late January, the San Diego Black Film Festival is one of the largest black film festivals in the country.
Six years into the making of A Lot Like You, we were still trying to figure out its narrative framework. At this point, both Dad and I were narrating the film, which was problematic because our two interweaving storylines were not distinct and separate enough from each other. And figuring out where Dad’s journey should end and mine should take over was unclear.
Unclear, that is, until I sat down with my parents for one final interview. I had to ask them if they’d known about my Aunts’ experiences (please see our trailerfor reference.) And quite honestly, I wasn’t prepared for what they said, or how they said it. This conversation was transformative for me, both as a filmmaker and as their daughter, as it finally unhinged my storyline from my father’s. In that moment, I realized I had to assume the role of storyteller, intentionally and unapologetically, to tell the only story I was ever really qualified to tell. My own.
