Stories in Action

“Don’t Erase My History,” a 30-inute documentary by East Bay LGBT youths about their journey to discover LGBTQ history — a history not available to them in schools, will be screened a the Santa Cruz Film Festival on Sunday, May 10 at 4 pm. The film was made as part of the Council’s Youth Digital Filmmakers program that involved youths in eight communities in California in making films about issues in their lives and communities.

Mexican immigrant Jose Luis Bonilla, dishwasher turned businessman, spent over 20 years building his colossal, hand-made Mexican Disneyland in the heart of California, only to abandon it after permit problems. Filmmakers Kevin Bender and Julio Fons capture Bonilla’s story in the documentary “Thinking Grande.” The film will have its television premier on San Diego’s public television station KPBS on Tuesday, May 26th, at 9:30 pm.

Apropos of Bender, 20 years ago, the filmmaker produced and directed “Ball Talk: Baseball’s Voices of Summer,” about six Hall of Fame baseball announcers: Mel Allen, Red Barber, Jack Brickhouse, Jack Buck, Curt Gowdy and Ernie Harwell. (The film, called “a gem” by the L.A. Times is available for the first time on DVD.) Now Bender has turned his attention to Vin Scully, the longtime announcer of the L.A. Dodgers in his new blog Scully’s Scorebook: Hits, Runs & Humanities.

Bender, a former English teacher, started listening to Scully while studying English and education at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1970s. “Vin’s broadcasts were nightly seminars in hits, runs and the humanities,” Bender remembers. “Steve Garvey’s forearms reminded him of Longfellow’s “Village Blacksmith,” a late-game comeback has the Dodgers not going “gentle into that good night,” a bad shortstop conjured up Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” because when fielding ground balls, the infielder also “stoppeth one of three.”

Bender has long wanted to honor and celebrate Scully. “Vin didn’t want to be in ‘Ball Talk,’ so this is a way I can show my appreciation for him.”

CSU Monterey Bay is holding a teen filmmaking festival next April and is seeking entries from teen filmmakers ages 13 to 19. Films must be under 5 minutes in length. Find out more.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a nice story yesterday morning about “A Choice of Weapons,” an entirely youth-produced Council-supported film about the impact of redevelopment on San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point community. You can read about the film project and then go and see the film this coming Monday at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th Street, San Francisco. There are two showings: 6:30 and 8:30 pm. Come out and support these amazing young people. See film trailer.

“A Choice of Weapons,” an entirely youth-produced feature film about the impact of redevelopment on San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point community, will premiere in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 29 at the Brava Theater, 2781 24th Street. The film project is one of eight funded by the Council as part of its How I See It: Youth Digital Filmmakers program. More.

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Two immigrant communities in Los Angeles — Ethiopian and Armenian — are the subjects of a new exhibit of photographs by Ara Oshagan at the Los Angeles Center for Experimental Art & Architecture. The exhibit is an outgrowth of Oshagan’s work on two separate California Story Fund projects. “The photos invite the reader to consider questions like, what is identity? What is community? And how the two are related,” Oshagan said. The exhibit runs from September 26 to October 17, 2008. An opening reception will be held on Friday, September 26 from 7 to 10 pm.

As part of the Council’s How I See It: Youth Digital Filmmakers program, a group of San Francisco East Bay teens from Ally Action, which works to insure schools are safe for youth regardless of sexual orientation, created a film about the absence of LGBTQ history in California schools. Their 30-minute film, “Don’t Erase My History,” already screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, will have its Bay Area premiere at a benefit event at the Metreon, San Francisco, on October 11, 2008. Funds raised will help complete and distribute the film. Find out more.

“Local 909er,” Enid Baxter Blader’s Council-supported documentary film about the rapidly growing Inland Empire, will be screened through September 14 as part of Signals: A Video Showcase at the Orange Lounge of the Orange Country Museum of Art, South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bear Street # 303, Costa Mesa. More.

You can also catch Bader’s film at the Riverside Public Library, 3581 Mission Inn Avenue. on Saturday, November 22 at 1 pm.

More than 300 teens in 21 California libraries are exploring, photographing and writing about their everyday environments in an innovative 10-week Council program – How I See It: My Place — based on the ideas of John Stilgoe, a Harvard landscape history professor. Most of the projects are currently underway and Angie Miraflor, teen services librarian at the San Jose Public Library, recently sent us some photographs taken by her group. See photographs.

Live in the L.A. area? The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is screening films from the Council’s California Stories projects on Sunday, June 8 starting at 11 am. Filmmakers Arthur Dong (“Hollywood Chinese”) and Jon Wilkman (“Chicano Rock”), among others, will be there to discuss their films and show clips. More information.

Teens from Mt. Shasta High School and Happy Camp High School will screen their film — “Voices Between the Mountains: Coming of Age in the Siskiyous” — about growing up in a small rural town — at College of the Sikiyous in Weed on Thurs., June 19, at 7:30 pm and at Klamath-Siskiyou Art Center in Happy Camp on Fri., June 27, at 9 pm. The students will discuss their filmmaking experiences following both screenings. The Happy Camp screening will be preceded by an organic dinner at 5 p.m. followed by an art opening. The film was created as part of the Council’s How I See It: Youth Digital Filmmakers program.

“Going On 13,” a California Documentary Project film about the growth and challenges of four preteen girls of color in Oakland, has been selected for screening at the Silverdocs: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival in the Washington, DC area. More.

Radio broadcast: “Prison Town, USA,” a California Documentary Project film about the effect of the prison boom on the small town of Susanville, Calif., now has a radio version, which will be airing on a number of stations from July 30 to Aug. 6. More.

Do You Represent an Arts Organization in California? Learn valuable proposal writing skills and hear insider tips on how to apply to the James Irvine Foundation’s new Creative Connections Fund at free workshops in various California locations in June. To find out more and to register, visit the Foundation Center’s website.

If you live in the L.A. area, be sure to catch “Living Under the Trees,” a photography exhibit documenting Oaxacan farmworker communities in rural California and those scattered on the edges of cities from San Diego to Santa Rosa. The photographs and accompanying stories are the work of award-winning photographer and journalist David Bacon, who received support for the project under CCH’s California Documentary Project. The exhibit is at the UCLA Downtown Labor Center. 675 S. Park View St, overlooking MacArthur Park, through the end of May.

Looking for a movie to rent this week? Mark Becker’s “Romántico,” a California Documentary Project film, is now available at Netflix and your local video store. The award-winning film takes you inside the life of Carmelo Muñiz Sanchez, a Mexican immigrant who tries to make a living and send money home by playing traditional Mexican music in San Francisco restaurants. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, movie critic Mick LaSalle said that the film “is an encounter with a special man. Muñiz has wisdom, humility and devoutness, and he’s a real artist. Maybe we’ve seen him before, but without director Mark Becker, we’d have never gotten to know him.”

CCH Programs Manager Raeshma Razvi reports that 73 organizations applied for a Youth Digital Filmmakers grant. The program, which is part of the Council’s “How I See It” campaign, will fund approximately eight projects that involve youth in making short films about how they see California. CCH will review the proposals over the next two months and announce the winners at the end of June. Winning organizations will receive grants of up to $30,000.