Firelight Media co-presented the opening panel at the 2024 CAAMFest Filmmaker Summit, Filming with Family, featuring Documentary Lab alum Jude Chehab (Director, Q), Vicky Du (Director, Light of the Setting Sun), and Kenji Tsukamoto (Director, Ashima), moderated by Livia Huang (Associate Producer, POV). The panel took place on Friday, May 10, 2024 at CAAMFest's Filmmaker Summit.
How do storytellers approach familial relationships across generations and geographies to create a narrative that’s true to the trauma and the love within? What does it take to face these relationships, those that nurture and cause harm? Join three filmmakers who have bravely made films about family, and hear their stories about how the journey can be both treacherous and rewarding.
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The Beyond Resilience Series is sponsored by Open Society Foundations. Beyond Resilience is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Field of Vision.
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The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) presents CAAMFest (formerly the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival) in May, the world’s largest showcase for new Asian American and Asian film, food and music programs, annually presenting over 100 works in San Francisco and Oakland. Since 1982, our film festival has been an important launching point for Asian American independent filmmakers as well as a vital source for new Asian cinema.
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Jude Chehab is a Lebanese-American filmmaker based between New York and Beirut. Her cinematic interests have drawn Jude to the exploration of the esoteric, the spiritual, and the unspoken. A richly layered visual and intimate personal shooting style, developed under the mentorship of Abbas Kiarostami’s final student group; Jude has been credited in collaborations with the BBC, Refinery29, Oxfam GB, and Doctors Without Borders. Jude is the director of the acclaimed documentary Q, the centerpiece documentary for CAAMFest 2024.
Vicky Du is a queer, Taiwanese-American filmmaker based in Berlin. Her short film GAYSIANS (Frameline, ’16) screened at 35+ film festivals around the world, had a public television broadcast on KQED, and was distributed to 1000+ middle and high school LGBTQ student groups. She directed and produced the Beijing episode of the nationally broadcast series ART IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (PBS, '20), and she was the Associate Producer of FREE SOLO (Oscar Winner, '19). Vicky has directed, produced and edited digital and broadcast short films for National Geographic, New York Times, History Channel, and The New Yorker. Her feature documentary Light of the Setting Sun, featured at CAAMFest 2024, centers on her confrontation with her family’s silence around the cycles of violence that have persisted since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949.
Kenji Tsukamoto is the director of Ashima, featured at CAAMFest 2024. He is also known for his work on Beehive Stories: Millard County (2011)and Dr. Fubalous (2012).
Livia Huang is a filmmaker from Baltimore, currently based in New York. She has received grants from Rooftop Films, NewFest, and Flies Collective, and her short films have screened at Berlinale, IFFR, New Directors/New Films and more. She holds a MFA from Brooklyn College and a BA from Columbia University, and works as an associate producer at the documentary series POV on PBS.
How does a documentary filmmaker fulfill their role in the midst of a pandemic and an uprising?
Firelight Media joined The Movement for Black Lives' national call to action on June 19 with a panel conversation that explored the history of Juneteenth and the burning of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, and grappled with the path toward economic justice for Black America.
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