Berkeley-native Bringing Film Home

Half-Life to be showcased at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, with a debut on Friday in Berkeley.

“Une Generation Perdue,” A Lost Generation. It’s the moniker Gertrude Stein used to describe Paris’ motley crew of ex-patriots coming of age in the 1900’s. Now a century later, we find that lost generations can come in all shapes and sizes—just look at the new independent film Half-Life by director Jennifer Phang.

The movie will be screening Friday, March 13, at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, as part of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Half-Life tells the story of the Wu family, an Asian-American family trying to find their way along the backroads of the suburban fairytale. The fim is set in the fictional town of "Diablo Valley," and not coincidentally, the Berkeley-born Phang attended Walnut Creek's Las Lomas High. In addition, the film was shot locally in Walnut Creek, Lafayette, Concord, Pleasanton, and Benicia.

Sanoe Lake, best known for her role in Blue Crush, takes the leading role of Pam Wu, a 19-year-old girl searching to make sense of her mother’s new relationship with a younger man, her own feelings of desertion toward her father, and the unconventional drama of her best friend’s fight against his parents over his sexuality. The film is punctuated by sequences of hand-animation, rendered by a team of artists working in the Bay Area during the movie's filming.

Phang, of Chinese-Malaysian and Vietnamese heritage, says that her film hopes to create and capture the most arresting imagery from her characters' day-to-day escapes, their dream-life, and the intersection of the two in the animated world.

“By making Half-Life, I hope to accomplish a compelling portrayal of culturally diverse people in difficult domestic situations, their complicated motives, and make the suggestion that overcoming intolerance and self-doubt in our own circles and communities is fundamental to human life,” Phang says.

It’s her hope, she explains, that Half-Life will convey life’s truths within her characters' conflicts, evoking empathy toward their plight for power and place in our tumultuous world. The title was chosen because of its relation to the film's plot. By definition, half-life means “the time required for one unstable element to decay and transform into another.” Phang relates the definition not only to the plot of the film, but also to its reflection of the human condition and the circumstances in which we live.

Having grown up in the East Bay, Phang says that she’s ecstatic about the local showing and looks forward to the response from Bay Area audiences.

“I'm really curious to see how our sophisticated Bay Area audience responds to the kinds of characters we play with … Living in the Diablo Valley was a large part of what inspired Half-Life and its themes,” Phang says.

Without revealing any spoilers, Phang adds that she purposefully provided a mysterious ending to the film in order to elicit questions for the audience to puzzle over. 

“I hope audiences leave talking about their interpretation of the end, and what that might mean for the characters and even for our own society.”

Already the film has garnered attention and acclaim since its debut in 2008. Among other honors, Half-Life was chosen to be a part of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection, while Phang was recognized at New York's International Asian American Film Festival. Yet despite its broad appeal, Phang says that the film’s coloring is rooted in Bay Area.

“We've traveled to festivals throughout the United States, Japan, Australia, Turkey, multiple festivals in Germany, and will be playing in London, Korea, and then back to a second festival in Turkey. Because some of the humor is so ‘Bay Area,’ the reception of the jokes is always a shade different in other countries, but the response is always positive,” Phang says.

She's also looking forward to screening in the Bay Area, where the many contributors to the film will able to share it with family and friends.

“It's also a real joy for me to finally be showing the film to the Diablo Valley community that supported its production so kindly. It's going to be a bit of a celebration for a lot of crewmembers and supporters who were Bay Area-grown as well.”

The show times for the movie are Friday, March 13 at 8:20 p.m., at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, bampfa.berkeley.edu; Sunday, March 15, 2009 at 12:45 p.m. at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas in San Francisco, sundancecinemas.com, and again at Sundance on Tuesday, , March 17, at 6:30p.m. For more information, visit halflifemovie.com. For tickets, go to festival.asianamericanmedia.org/2009/.

 

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