Bay Area films keep it real at Sundance festival

Oakland Tribune, Jan 16, 2007 by Chris De Benedetti

PARIS HILTON should beware.

She and other vapid jet-setters heading to Sundance this week just to party in the snow should know that the Bay Area's independent filmmakers are coming.

They're bringing their films.

And, judging by their work's darkly themed content, they're in a baaaad mood.

Several filmmakers with local roots ranging from Saratoga to Sebastopol have had their films accepted to this year's Sundance Film Festival, the independent-movie mecca that begins Thursday.

At least seven Bay Area artists have films entered there, including a handful of documentaries alternately focusing on the horrors of war and domestic political repression.

In addition, the festival's opening night film, "Chicago 10," has key Bay Area ties though it was directed by New Yorker Brett Morgen. The documentary depicts the bizarre, raucous court trial of 1960s political activists, including Oakland's own Black Panther Party co- founder Bobby Seale.

We spoke with the Bay Area directors as they readied themselves to hit the 11-day festival in Park City, Utah, with their films in tow.

War is hell

Berkeley filmmakers Steven Okazaki and John Else have known each other for years. Even given that connection, what are the odds that their separate documentaries would not only cover the same topic -- the atom bomb and its use on Japan in 1945 -- but also be screened at Sundance the same year?

"We're the A-bomb twins," Else said.

He was joking, but Else is serious about filmmaking, having had three previous movies screen at Sundance. His fourth is titled "The Wonders Are Many: The Making of Dr.

from Living 1

Atomic," a feature-length documentary about an opera production on the Manhattan Project and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the atom bomb.

The opera -- titled "Dr. Atomic" -- was directed by Peter Sellars and John Adams.

Else, a Portola Valley resident who runs UC Berkeley's documentary program in the graduate school of journalism, first made a film about Oppenheimer in 1980.

"There is an oddly chilling fascination about those bombs, and with me there is an endless interest and mystery with Oppenheimer," Else said. "The man was so cultured and smart he could have done anything. But he ended up overseeing the design of the most savage weapon in history. What are we to make of that?"

Okazaki's film, "White Light/Black Rain," centers on the Japanese survivors who lived among the charred ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the United States bombings. It is estimated that 200,000 people died instantly, and

200,000 who survived are still living today.

The feature-length documentary interviews many of those hibakusha -- or people exposed to the bomb.

Even in Japan, there is a surprising lack of knowledge about the nuclear bombings, Okazaki said, adding that the film shows a number of Tokyo teens who knew nothing about the significance of Aug. 6, 1945, the day Hiroshima was bombed.

"The Japanese memory is fading away," said Okazaki, an Oscar winner. "For me, that makes the film even more timely."

Perhaps because of the ongoing war in Iraq, the theme of war's brutality is well represented at this year's festival.

Likewise, Palo Alto resident Bill Guttentag has co-directed "Nanking," which delves into atrocities committed in 1937, when invading Japanese soldiers killed roughly 200,000 people and raped tens of thousands of Chinese women and children.

"This is called the 'forgotten Holocaust.' I thought those words should never be in the same sentence," said Guttentag, who co- directed the film with Dan Sturman.

Was it hard to get victims to open up for the filming?

"There were people in China who really wanted to tell their story," said Guttentag, who teaches a graduate film/TV business course at Stanford University. "One woman who was raped hadn't talked about it until now -- 70 years later. For some, this was the most powerful moment in their lives."

The war at home

Sundance's opening-night film covers the tensions brewing in late- 1960s America by focusing on the chaotic Chicago court trial of counterculture political activists whom authorities accused of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden and Jerry Rubin were among seven activists charged.

The eighth was Bobby Seale, who was infamously ordered bound and gagged for three days by presiding Judge Julius Hoffman during the trial. All the activists strongly felt the charges were false, Seale said. But none of them was as vocal as Seale, who repeatedly clashed with Hoffman in the courtroom.

Finally, "the judge said, 'Take him in the back room and deal with him appropriately,'" Seale said.

After the bailiffs taped his mouth shut and chained his ankles and wrists to a chair, those in the courtroom witnessed the surreal scene of an ongoing trial proceeding while a frustrated Seale was shaking the chair and making muffled cries through the tape and gauze over his mouth.