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Spotlight at Cinequest on De Anza filmmakers
By Cody Kraatz
De Anza College has become known for producing high-caliber filmmakers who have gone on to successful careers in the movie industry.
The work of the latest crop of De Anza filmmakers is on display at the 17th annual Cinequest film festival, which runs in various venues in downtown San Jose through March 11.
Current film student Car Nazzal and 2006 graduate Michael Chance both competed with students from Academy of Art University, Columbia University, San Jose State University, Munich Film School and the University of California at Berkeley in a student shorts competition held March 4-5.
Two De Anza alumni, Kurt Kuenne and Shelly Prevost, have films in the maverick competition, and De Anza film instructors Zaki Lisha and Susan Tavernetti will serve on juries to pick maverick winners.
Lisha, who founded the 900-student film and television program in 1974 and is now its coordinator, said people should be impressed but not surprised.
"To think that we have a couple films at Cinequest competing with the USCs and the NYUs is incredible. We compete with them constantly," said Lisha. Many of De Anza's film and television students have transferred to prestigious four-year university film schools.
De Anza's program owes its success, in part, to the voters in the Foothill-De Anza Community College District who approved a $491 million bond measure in June 2006 to repair school facilities and upgrade classroom technology.
Bond money has been used to purchase three $6,000 high-definition film cameras for the film and television program, and another $400,000 will go to upgrading its TV studio over the next couple of years, Lisha said.
Technological support in the form of cameras and editing equipment, combined with a variety of theoretical and practical classes, are what sparked Prevost's filmmaking career.
"I started from scratch there with Darcy Cohn's documentary class," said Prevost. Right after Prevost completed that class, transgender Gwen Araujo, 17, was brutally murdered in Newark in 2002.
Prevost had her subject. She commuted from San Jose, where she lived at the time, to learn editing and filmmaking skills, and released a 10-minute documentary short about Araujo in 2005.
The short toured the country in about 30 film festivals, many of them geared towards gay and lesbian audiences. The longer documentary in Cinequest, Trained in the Ways of Men, goes deeper and follows two years of Araujo's murder trials.
"It took four years for me to learn how to make the longer film,'' said Prevost, a transgendered person who has lived as a woman since 1997.
"It was a very hard experience for me and they wouldn't let me be a youth group leader [at a Presbyterian church] anymore," she said. "There are amazingly limited resources for transgender youth. They end up in the same place--either on the streets or being killed or suicides. They're beautiful young people; they just don't fit the stereotypes for their gender."
Prevost, a Fremont resident and a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is trying to support transgendered people and to keep them safe at school.
"They have no place in society" right now, she said.
Prevost sees increasing recognition of transgender needs in the lesbian and gay community, which offers support through such agencies as the Billy DeFrank Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in San Jose.
She hopes her film will counteract negative transgender images in such movies as Psycho and Silence of the Lambs and on TV shows such as Jerry Springer. Her next project will probably be on a related subject, but fictional because it gives her greater narrative freedom.
The film will show at Cinequest on March 10 at 7:45 p.m. and on March 11 at 4:45 p.m., both at the San Jose Repertory Theatre.
De Anza alumnus Kurt Kuenne's short film Validation will play at 1:30 p.m. on March 7 at the Camera 12 Theatres. The musical comedy supposes that besides validating parking, an attendant gives real validation--compliments, praise and acknowledgement.
Michael Chance's suspense-driven short The Reason, completed when he graduated in December, follows a veteran and rookie police officer to offer some reasons why officers choose to go in the line of danger. Chance borrowed a Campbell police car for the shoot.
The film is competing with On the Lot, an American Idol-esque reality TV show that was co-created by Stephen Spielberg scheduled to air on the FOX TV network.
De Anza instructor Tavernetti, who reviews films for the Palo Alto Weekly, will be one of three jurists to pick the Maverick Spirit Award, Cinequest's highest honor, and the best debut film from a new artist.
"I'll be searching the Cinequest screens for two mavericks: the newcomer with a unique cinematic vision and voice, and the innovative storyteller-stylist who crafted the rare film that redefines filmmaking," said Tavernetti.
Nazzal's experimental short Truth of the Matter was scheduled to compete with four-year university students' films in a student competition held March 4 and 5. The film examines how comparing one's perspective to someone else's can help people question their motivations and lives.
"I'm always questioning my motivations. Maybe I'm reading too much existential philosophy," said Nazzal, who has traveled to Palestine and Europe and plans to go to Brazil after she finishes at De Anza.
