Intimate, epic -- and even indie

By Kevin Crust

May 4, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

BEGINNING tonight and running for eight days, VC Filmfest 2006: The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival continues to chart the rise of Asian American filmmakers, reflecting the increasingly diverse presence of the community in the Southland. With more than 140 films, including 16 Asian American features, the festival offerings vary in scope from the intimate to the epic.

The plight of a Vietnamese family, framed by an ancient parable, is movingly depicted in writer-director Ham Tran’s ambitious “Journey From the Fall.” Beginning with the fall of Saigon in 1975 and continuing to the early 1980s in Orange County, the story traces the separation of Long Nguyen (Long Nguyen), who chooses to remain behind when the U.S. pulls out, from his family. His wife, Mai (Diem Lien), mother (Kieu Chinh) and young son (Nguyen Thai Nguyen) make the perilous voyage to a new life in less-than-seaworthy vessels as Long is detained in brutal Communist “re-education centers.”

Julia Kwan’s gentle “Eve & the Firehorse” is told from the perspective of an intelligent, 9-year-old Chinese Canadian girl. Growing up in 1975 Vancouver is a confusing time for Eve (Phoebe Jojo Kut) and her older sister, Karena (Hollie Lo) when several tragedies and near tragedies occur after their mother (Vivian Wu) impulsively cuts down an apple tree in their yard. Kwan employs magical realism to depict the young girls’ growing spiritual curiosity in the face of the events and Karena’s sudden fascination with Catholicism.

Death triggers a different response in a Queens teenager in Tanuj Chopra’s authentically gritty “Punching at the Sun.” Seventeen-year-old South Asian immigrant Mameet (Misu Khan) sinks into angry depression after his older brother, Sanjay, is killed during a robbery in their family’s market. Always in basketball star Sanjay’s shadow, Mameet loses his sense of self and struggles to find meaning in an indifferent world. Chopra credibly blends the adopted hip-hop culture of Mameet and his friends with the post-Sept. 11 attitudes they experience as immigrants.

Taiwanese filmmaker Cheng Wen-tang’s melancholy “Blue Cha Cha” follows pretty young A-yu (Su Hui-lun) as she is released from prison and looks up former cellmate Ann (Lu Yi-ching). The older, tougher woman now runs a bar and takes A-yu under her wing, but the fragile younger woman is susceptible to the charms of several men and must deal with them before discovering something to truly smile about.

Overflowing with indie-pop ennui, “Colma: The Musical” celebrates the sheer nowhereness of a place you may have passed through riding BART to the San Francisco airport. Jake Moreno, composer-lyricist-screenwriter H.P. Mendoza and L.A. Renigen star as three post-high school friends facing down the dreary prospect of working at the mall and the romantic rigors of youth. Director Richard Wong nimbly guides his young cast through a “Rent” for the suburban Bay Area set.

Kieslowski 101

Polish cinema continues to get its due, following up last week’s Polish Film Festival with LACMA’s “The Essential Kieslowski” series. Krzysztof Kieslowski, best known for his “Decalogue” series and the “Three Colors” trilogy, first came to international prominence with the 1979 dark satire “Camera Buff.” Co-writer Jerzy Stuhr stars as a Polish factory worker whose purchase of an 8-millimeter camera transforms him and his relationships.

Four years after Kieslowski’s death in 1996, Stuhr directed and starred in “Big Animal” based on an early Kieslowski screenplay about an accountant and his wife who adopt a camel left behind in their small town by a visiting circus. Stuhr will be in attendance. Also screening this weekend are “A Short Film About Killing” and “A Short Film About Love,” the two “Decalogue” installments that Kieslowski expanded to feature length.

China today

A drama that transcends its formalist constraints, Liu Jiayin’s “Oxhide” makes its U.S. premiere at REDCAT after international festival stops in Berlin, Hong Kong and Vancouver. Constructed from 23 static shots, each representing a scene, the film features Jiayin and her parents in their tiny apartment going about their lives in discomfiting proximity to one another. The fixed camera captures the banality and tension of a contemporary, single-child Chinese family experiencing the growing pains of capitalism. Jiayin uses widescreen to heighten the claustrophobic conditions and creates an unexpectedly compelling narrative.

Mind games

“Nine Short Films by Tony Gault” at 7 Dudley Cinema presents work by the filmmaker-academic in which he utilizes “color saturation and image mutation” to satirize and deconstruct a variety of illnesses and maladies. “Picture #4” riffs on psychotherapy, exploring Gault’s fascination with a carefully guarded image viewed while taking the Thematic Apperception test and the therapeutic community’s protectiveness toward that image.

Gault suggestively cuts together the found footage in “Not Too Much Remember” to create a “Twilight Zone”-meets-”Unsolved Mysteries” investigation of whether narratives form consciousness or vice versa. Playing on familiar ideas of covert government experimentation, the filmmaker generates an effect simultaneously disturbing and amusing. Much more personal, “Housesitting” chronicles a stint Gault spent looking after a friend’s home and animals in rural Cortez, Colo. A bout with colitis and the enforced solitude is a lens through which Gault explores personal boundaries and his relationship to nature.

Also: Filmforum presents “Siting Video: New Works from Otis College of Art and Design,” a collection of experimental student-generated videos. Among the works being screened is Mary Younakof’s “Beyond the Red Door.”

Screenings

VC Filmfest

* “Journey From the Fall”: 7 tonight

* “Eve & the Firehorse”: 7 p.m. Saturday

Where: Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., L.A.

* “Punching at the Sun”: 7 p.m. Friday

* “Blue Cha Cha”: 2:15 p.m. Sunday

* “Colma: The Musical”: 9:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood

Info: (213) 680-4462, Ext. 68, www.vconline.org

The Essential Kieslowski

* “Camera Buff” and “Big Animal”: 7:30 p.m. and 9:35 p.m. Friday