Hmong And Native-American Communities Will Shoot and Edit Short Films

Under his direction, a group of teens from the Twin Cities’ Hmong and Native-American communities will shoot and edit short films during a weeklong digital-video workshop designed to give participants the tools to document their own stories.

June 15-22, 2001 Spencer Nakasako Artist-In-Residence

Believing that everyone should have access to the media of video and television to tell their stories, California-based filmmaker Spencer Nakasako became the artist mentor for a youth video program in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. For more than a decade, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian youths have produced short videos based on their personal memories and experiences. As a Walker artist-in-residence, Nakasako will conduct two workshops with groups consisting of 8 to 10 young people, each from a different ethnic community in the Twin Cities. | Www.Walkerart.Org

This summer, Nakasako will take the digital media lab housed in Walker on Wheels (WoW) to Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis. Under his direction, a group of teens from the Twin Cities’ Hmong and Native-American communities will shoot and edit short films during a weeklong digital-video workshop designed to give participants the tools to document their own stories. More on Walker on Wheels programs. Nakasako won a national Emmy Award for a.k.a. Don Bonus, the video diary of a Cambodian immigrant teenager. His recent work, Kelly Loves Tony, a video diary about a Lu Mien teenage couple growing up too fast and too soon in Oakland, California, aired nationally on PBS last summer. He also wrote the screenplay and codirected a feature film about Hong Kong, Life Is Cheap . . . but Toilet Paper Is Expensive, with Wayne Wang. Recently, he was awarded a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and he also teaches film in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley.

Nakasako has just returned from Cambodia where he has been filming a diary project for public television. Please follow these links to learn more about the Twin Cities’ Hmong and Native-American communities and to explore the world of youth media access and production: Asian Media Access, The Circle, Hmong Cultural Center Inc., and Listen Up. Exhibition Information.