Monthly Archives: June 2020

Interview

Fringe Festival directors pivot to virtual Fringettes

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The Oregon Fringe Festival has gone virtual this year with Volumes of Fringettes playing monthly on You Tube.

The Oregon Center for the Arts has traditionally produced the Oregon Fringe Festival as a multi-day event in the spring to “celebrate unconventional art in unconventional spaces.”

After the cancellation of the 2020 Fringe Festival, the event’s production team began producing monthly video premieres called Fringettes. I met co-directors Paige Gerhard, Jade Hails and Jared Brown one afternoon on Zoom. Continue reading Fringe Festival directors pivot to virtual Fringettes →

Interview

Rogue Award winner talks about her films

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Renee Tajima-Peña received the Ashland Independent Film Festival’s Rogue Award for her “films of lasting significance and current relevance.”

Her films, “My America…or Honk if You Love Buddha” and “No Más Bebés,” were screened on the second weekend of AIFF2020’s three-week virtual film festival.

“No Más Bebés” tells of immigrant mothers who sued doctors, the state, and the U.S. government after they were sterilized while giving birth at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center during the 1960s and ’70s.

A Harvard graduate in East Asian studies and sociology, Tajima-Peña is professor of Asian American studies and filmmaking at UCLA. We visited by telephone.

EH: How did you become a filmmaker?

RTP: I was a student activist in high school and college. In college I got interested in filmmaking with other activist students; we did our own videos. We decided to make videos about things we cared about. We did that as part of being activists. It was very rudimentary. Continue reading Rogue Award winner talks about her films →