As many of you already know, we’ve launched a new film initiative entitled INTERPRETATIONS to support aspiring filmmakers. In a nutshell, you make a short film of no more than 3 minutes using the same script we provide (get all the info here). To help us launch, we commissioned several filmmaker friends to make their own shorts using our script and we’ll be featuring each one of them (including a few words from the filmmakers themselves) over the course of the next two weeks.

Today we present Cambodian American by Emmy Award-winner Spencer Nakasako:

FILMMAKER’S STATEMENT:
When Justin first presented me with the challenge of using the four lines of dialogue—“It’s not something I’d do”; “Well”; “It’s not what I expected”; “You sure”—the only thing that came to mind was my long journey of working with Southeast Asian kids in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. The end result is Cambodian American.

SPENCER

Spencer Nakasako is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker whose credits include the documentaries a.k.a. Don Bonus, Kelly Loves Tony, Refugee, and the feature collaboration with Wayne Wang, Life is Cheap. He was the founder and director of the pioneering Digital Media Lab in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, working and collaborating with Southeast Asian youth from 1991 to 2008. His work has screened nationally at the NY MOMA, San Francisco International Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Los Angeles Film Festival, Hawaii Film Festival, Flaherty Film Seminar, as well as, internationally at festivals in Berlin, Toronto, Yamagata, Sydney, and Amsterdam, to name a few. Nakasako has been an artist-in-residence at Stanford University, Walker Art Center, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and a lecturer at both the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz.

For more information on how to get involved with INTERPRETATIONS, click here.

You can also see the commissioned shorts on our YouTube Channel. Not all the films are up yet so keep your eye out for new ones and subscribe to our channel be the first to see them all.