UCLA’s film school allows its filmmakers to tell whatever
stories they like, and more often than not, this leads to personal
filmmaking.
In the case of UCLA alumna Vivian Umino, her short film
“Ill Repair” is actually about two older men, but
maintains that it’s still about her. The men are
second-generation Japanese-Americans, also known as Nisei, like
Umino’s father, and they are quibbling over a watch one of
them, a watchsmith, has failed to fix.
“I was always fascinated and befuddled at the psychology
of the Nisei man, and how they communicate without communicating.
To this day, there’s certain things my father did I’ll
never understand. This film captures one of those moments,”
Umino said. “Film is a way of exploring what you don’t
understand.”
Both Umino’s and current UCLA graduate student Juli
Kang’s film, “The Liberation of Everyday Life,”
were screened last Wednesday as part of this year’s Visual
Communications Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film and Video
Festival.
The theme behind the six-film screening was “Behind Closed
Doors” and its inclusion of only female Asian American
filmmakers hoped to shed light on their unique visions.
Umino struggled with portraying the history behind the men.
“People who know about Japanese-American history,
internment and no-no boys wouldn’t need any of those markers
in,” Umino said. “I made the decision to put more
explanation in because I didn’t want to lose half my
audience.”
Umino’s film features mostly subtext, unspoken feelings
which the actors navigate through the dialogue. Sab Shimono was one
of them, a professional actor whose work had been featured in
“The Big Hit” and “Waterworld.” Umino said
she was able to secure Shimono because of the complexity of the
role, a scarcity among Asian American actors that films like hers
and UCLA alumnus Justin Lin’s “Better Luck
Tomorrow” hope to change.
“(Shimono) is a seasoned professional actor as good as any
of the best actors, but because he’s Asian there’s a
huge limit to the roles that he gets,” Umino said.
“I definitely think there are more opportunities. When I
was starting out, there were no roles for Asians. Zippo.”
In Kang’s film, a woman attempts to reprogram herself to
do battle with corporate America and her own sense of
powerlessness.
It’s a surreal spectacle with dream sequences in a
sun-drenched forest and a guru-like man (played by a UCLA
professor) who meets the woman accidentally on street corners
trying to reaffirm her leftist mantras. Kang made the film out of a
similar sense of trying to balance making a living with maintaining
ideals.
“When I first started film school, I thought I was going
to make Asian American films and be an activist and say something
about the world and the human condition but it’s so hard just
to tell a basic story,” Kang said. “I think I made this
film out of frustration of that.”
But as with Umino, Kang’s character does not deal with
Asian- Americanness full on, but only as a secondary consequence of
who she is. The woman is a disgruntled secretary whose obedience to
the boss masks the swallowed angst underneath.
“A lot of Asian American women have that submissive
quality, that they’re supposed to be a certain way,”
Kang said. “I definitely struggle with that.”
Both Kang and Umino’s films were made as part of the UCLA
film school program. Umino actually made “Ill Repair”
in her first year of graduate work, while Kang’s film was her
latest. Umino is now working on a feature film script as well as
editing for UCLA documentarian Marina Goldovskaya’s new
film.
Kang, meanwhile, is working on a documentary about her
father’s grocery store, a reflection of her documentary roots
assisting filmmaker Renee Tajima-Pena.
But no matter where their careers lead, they will always come
back to who they are and where they came from.
“I can’t quite divide my art from who I am,”
Umino said.