TV REVIEWS : Mixed Offerings in ‘Independent Eye’

Multiculturalism is the emphasis of most of the seven shorts collected in tonight’s installment of KCET’s “Independent Eye” series, an hour’s worth of factual or fanciful video pieces curated by the “L.A. Freewaves” exchange.

Running times range from 30 seconds for a rap-scored, anti-drunk-driving public-service announcement, to 19 minutes for the final piece, a nostalgic reverie on Jewish family life in and after Boyle Heights.

The middle segments of tonight’s hour hold the pearls. “Pro and Con,” a two-part short by Joanne Priestly and Joan Gratz, is a terrifically animated piece that uses interviews with an earnest female prison guard (real) and male inmate (fictionalized) as a jumping-off point for surprisingly appropriate, yet wild, rotoscope-and-beyond graphics. It’s a well-realized cross between the documentary form and the serious looniness of an animated MTV spot.

Also touching, David Chung’s “Turtle Boat Head” fixes a camera on a Korean American keeping shop in a black neighborhood from behind bulletproof glass, and ventures to wonder what psychological war (and riot) wounds might lie behind the dutiful facade his customers take for granted.

Assimilating in L.A. is the theme of the closing two shorts as well. Martha Chono-Helsley’s “30 Miles From J-Town” collects imagery for poet Amy Uyematsu’s random ruminations on life as a thoroughly Americanized girl of Japanese descent here. Beverly Ginsburg’s “The Gypsy Princess” uses a wealth of familial home-movie footage to recount several generations of local Jews coming of age, though the “royal family” conceit of the fairy-tale narration will seem cuter to the actual relatives involved than to the rest of us.

Other videos range from the obliqueness of “Height of Appetite,” an impressionistic meditation on nostalgia prompted by a sense of taste, to the obviousness of “Judy’s Do,” a thin comedy sketch whose one joke is imagining illegal-immigrant day-laborers who happen to be effeminate hairdressers.

* “Independent Eye/L.A. Freewaves 401” airs at 11 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.