APAture 2002 : Artists

Featured Artists   |   Participating Artists

Anita Chang : Film

Anita Chang is a San Francisco-based filmmaker whose award-winning works have screened nationally and internationally and broadcasted on public television. Works include An elegy to our small selves (2002), She Wants to Talk to You (2001), Imagining Place (1999), Unboxed (1999), Mommy, What's Wrong? (1997), One Hundred Eggs a Minute (1996) and Spofford Alley (1994). Her works are distributed by Women Make Movies, Third World Newsreel, NAATA and UC Berkeley's Extension for Media. Awards include KQED/Peter J. Owens Filmmaker Award, San Francisco Arts Commission Grant, and Gertrude Murphy Fine Arts Fellowship.

Chang was born in the U.S. to Taiwanese parents who immigrated in the 1960's, and grew up in Ohio and Massachusetts. She received her MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University and BA in American Studies and English from Tufts University. In New York City, she worked as a youth counselor in Chinatown, a civil rights investigator/activist and editor/writer for an Asian American zine. She then studied and performed with SF-based Butoh dancer/ choreographer Judith Kajiwara for 5 years.

She guest lectures, curates and writes on film, and teaches video, Super-8 and 16mm film production, and courses on alternative documentary production and experimental filmmaking. She teaches in the Film departments at San Francisco State University and San Francisco Art Institute, and is Education Director at TILT (Teaching Intermedia Literacy Tools), a grassroots organization which brings media literacy education and media production to youth in public schools and after school programs.

Artist Statement

I am interested in engaging the moving image medium as a tool for exploring broad universal themes. My films are politically motivated, but always, aesthetically based. Whether its working with the celluloid surface (e.g. hand-processing), manipulating time and rhythm (e.g., re-photography), using sound in unconventional ways, or proffering the personal truths and insights of my subjects (and at times, myself), I am always discovering ways to experiment with content and form that brings the "real life" moving image genre to another level of interpretation and audience experience.

Still from She Wants to Talk to You (2002)

For APAture

Revealing the Political Through the Personal" -- I will show excerpts from She Wants to Talk to You (2001), Imagining Place (1999), and Mommy, What's Wrong? (1997), to illustrate some documentary and techniques I employ to speak about political and social issues of our times. With respect to each clip, I will discuss my creative process, interest in the themes explored, relationship to the interview subjects, aesthetic choices, editing decisions, and sound design.

Links

NAATA: Filmmaker of the Month August 2001: Anita Chang