Set in Philadelphia, The Watermelon Woman is the story of Cheryl, a 20-something black lesbian struggling to make a documentary about Fae Richards, a beautiful and elusive 1930s black film actress, popularly known as "The Watermelon Woman." While uncovering the meaning of Fae Richards' life, Cheryl experiences a total upheaval in her personal life. Her love affair with Diana, a beautiful white woman, and her interactions with the gay and black communities are subject to the comic yet biting criticism of her best friend Tamara. Meanwhile, each answer Cheryl discovers about the Watermelon Woman evokes a flurry of new questions.

Stranger Inside is the story of a young Black woman, Treasure Lee, who, after twenty-one years of life in and out of jail, is being transferred for the first time to the main State Facility for Women. It is at State that Treasure finds out about a bad-ass lifer nick-named "Brownie." But until that moment Treasure had thought that her mother, Margaret "Brownie" Lee, was dead. Could Treasure's dream possibly come true? Stranger Inside is a bittersweet drama about one young woman's struggle to confront the secrets and lies that have, until now, shaped and controlled her life.

Information unavailable at time of printing.

This workshop will explore the various avenues of funding and distribution and the struggles and opportunities for independent women of color filmmakers and media artists today. Drawing upon the insight of women of color who've been there, done that, and tried a whole lot more, we will discuss and share tactics for getting financial support for our visions and the final work out to the people. Speakers will include filmmakers who've traveled the festival circuit, distribution folks who know the inside, and programmers who've surveyed the path.

During the first three years of the festival I had the opportunity to foreground central concerns found in much of women of color short-length film and video--identity, sexuality, memory and their inherent mutability. This retrospective program is comprised of works from the first and second festivals: The Colors of Her Language and Of Visible Distinction. The first title came from my own visions of multiplicity and cultural translation, the second was a play on the title of the first major international festival of women of color film and video, In Visible Colours (Vancouver, Canada, 1989). For this retrospective program I chose to screen much of the heart of the first program of the first festival, mining those aforementioned cardinal territories from which many of the women short-length makers assemble their works.

Illusions is one of Julie Dash's small masterpieces. Set in 1942, this narrative illuminates still timely issues of cultural exclusion and the power of the Hollywood machine to manipulate national identity and history.

Two Lies is a subtly poignant precursor of more recent works on dealing with physical alteration and cultural assimilation. A marvel of optical printing that melds the experimental with narrative story-telling techniques, even its silences are rich with the language of uncertainty.

Juxta is a profoundly insightful portrait of intergenerational racism and its effects on two Japanese women and their Japanese Euroamerican and Japanese African American children in a narrative that spans the period from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Urban, but Definitely Indian represents award-winning poet Esther G. Belin's early work. Her portrait of the urban Native American experience it is a sometimes raucous exclamation of an often invisible perspective.

Columbus on Trial is one of the Lourdes Portillo's few forays into overt, if still ironic humor. Collaborating with the celebrated all-male Chicano performance troupe, Culture Clash, Portillo interjects enough espiritu chicana chingonas to keep the fuses of race and gender equally aflame.

Each one of the following films was featured during one of these four incredible years of the festival's history where the transformative act of representing was remapped here at UCSC. The set of films and videos challenges the expected conventions of representations of women of color by reworking media figures, stereotypes and mass media genres such as MTV, aerobics videos, melodrama and ranchera. It brings together critically needed, but often unexpected forms of, solidarity with the transformative mixture of humor and hard-hitting political analysis.

Director: Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie
Created for the National Museum of the Native American in New York, NTV presents channel surfing as a way to survey social commentary about Native issues such as identity, Shamanism, and sports teams' names in a humorous and biting manner. Using a series of mixed media skits, NTV airs as an ongoing parody of MTV where satire and political insight are given to issues facing Indian America.

The morning after a break-in at her Korean immigrant father's convenience store, Il Bae, 20-something and strong-willed, catches a hunky shoplifter and new surprises abound. In the space of one day, Il Bae's family routine collides with her New World romance, catching her between loyalty to her father and her passion for a new lover with a checkered past. Physical chemistry, cross-cultural confusions, racism, and the constant threat of urban violence converge in this fast-paced, wryly humorous take-off on love at first sight where trust and desire strike a delicate balance.

This film is a playful, but questioning personal exploration of race, gender, sexuality, adolescent notions of beauty, body image and representation. These multi-layered, inter-connected issues are intimately examined through 1970s "blaxploitation" movie goddess Pam Grier in Foxy Brown. The videomaker tries on the powerful badass supermama role of Foxy Brown while exploring the space between body and image. The lyrical video is gently critical, playing with the idea of masquerade as well as girlhood and adolescent fantasies of black womanhood. 

This film portrays an event-filled day-in-the-life of its eponymous heroine, Carmelita Tropicana, a Latin performance artist who supports herself as a building superintendent. Tropicana's experience -- a single woman and lesbian living on New York's Lower East Side - are filtered through a nightclub performance in which she embellishes them in humorous monologues and novella-style melodrama. This film introduces lesbian cultural terrorist Carmelita Tropicana, girl-gang rebel by day and club-singer by night through a shrewd and hilarious dissection of cultural stereotypes

Biographical information unavailable at time of printing.

Palestinian women’s contributions to the Palestinian National struggle and to Palestinian culture under the Israeli military occupation have been vital to the continuation of the Palestinian struggle heritage for the past eighty years. Palestinian women's nationalistic consciousness was never less than Palestinian men, they fought the Israeli occupier in their own homes, on the streets, at schools, at checkpoints, and in its oppressive barbaric prisons. Roula Abo Deho and Zahra Karoush, two Palestinian women among thousands of Palestinian women political prisoners, were detained, tortured, mentally, physically and sexually terrorized by the Israeli occupier for their unquestioned beliefs in the moral, historic, and basic human rights to resist the Israeli occupier/colonizer on their land. In this interview, Roula and Zahra talk about their experience in Israeli Prison and their feelings and reactions towards the Israeli occupation post imprisonment.

View an extraordinary Palestinian refugee children's photo exhibit done by the children themselves, ages 10-15, in the refugee camps in Lebanon and Palestine; a Palestinian refugee women's exhibit from the refugee camps in Lebanon, and a Palestinian Bedouin women photo exhibit.

This set of short films explores the roots we travel as we make homes for our families and ourselves. By sharing with us worldviews often not like our own, these films ask us to consider how memories of the past and experiences in the present shape who we are and how we live. Some sad, some loving, some uncertain, these films invite us to imagine ourselves as part of broad yet intimate communities where love is all about work.

Full Moon (1999, 18 mins, 16 mm, color)

Director: Marie Chao

Mei awakens to herself on the day of the Chinese Moon Festival. Now that the kids have left to pursue their own futures, the entire house is left with the routine monotony she shares with her husband. In the midst of cleaning, however, she is suddenly disgusted by the mundane life she lives, and decides to run away. Now she has to decide whether to return to the only way of life she knows, or to move on and fulfill her newborn awareness and desires.

During the Mexican Revolution, a widow buried a coffee can filled with family treasures and crossed into the United States. The can was never found and became a lost ancestral time capsule. More than eighty years later, the woman's great-grandaughter uses her own story of moving to San Francisco to explore the scent of history and the organic texture of migratory memory.

Director: Ellie Lee
This is dystopia. As an invasion threatens the United States, a family is forced to consider what home and family look and sound like. Meanwhile, a beggar becomes a dog as a means of survival. Does anyone in a state of real and psychological war emerge unscathed?

Ellie Lee is a filmmaker and artist based in Boston. Her first film, REPETION COMPULSION, combined charcoal sketches with the taped interviews of battered homeless women, revealing how violence in childhood often carries over into the lives of adult women. DOG DAYS, much like her first film, challenges us to see how experiences, at times beyond our control, shape how we look at the world and live within it.

Lullaby (1999, 6 mins, 16mm, B/W)

Director: Antonia Kao
Our stories enable us to survive and resist. In this film, a young girl is welcomed into a dream world when her Jamaican grandmother tells her an alternative creation story.

Antonia Kao received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1994 and is a candidate for an M.F.A. in cinema-television production at the University of Southern California (USC) in 2001. Her film credits include HAPPY BRIRTHDAY (1998), LULLABY (1998), JUMP ROPE SONG (1999), and STRAIGHT WHITE MEN AND ME (2000). Her films have screened internationally in festivals, classrooms, and conferences. Before making films, she wrote and/or edited for The New York Times, Girlfriends Magazine, Sojourner: The Women's Forum, and The State of Asian America.

Nupur (2001, 8 mins, 35mm, color)

Director: Aparna Malladi
Nupur is the story of a little Indian girl who returns to her ancestral home for the first time. Charmed by her surroundings, she is nevertheless determined to challenge her family's rules and chart her own path by drawing upon submerged memories and traditions she discovers in the attic.

Please see page 27.

The Louisiana Correctional Institute is located in the swamps of southern Louisiana in the small town of St. Gabriel. Built in 1970 to house an increasing population of female convicts, of 900 women located there today, 75% of these are mothers and one fourth of them are serving sentences of fifteen years or more. The prison compound has a surreal quality; there are no searchlight-capped towers or barbed wire fences. Filmmaker Khadivi delivers a striking, sensitive portrait of life in this deceptively peaceful atmosphere, which is filled with stories of life on the streets, abuse, freedom, childbirth and motherhood. Six women - a grandmother, a young high school student, a pregnant woman, a recovering heroin addict, a prison guard, and the only woman on death row - were brave enough to share their frustrations and hopes.

This film has won international acclaim for its dramatic tale of young Tino, a Samoan boy in charge of raising his younger siblings and the unexpected tragedy that binds them closer together. Director Sima Urale writes, "The story is seen through the eyes of the children. It is their perspective that the sounds and visuals, combined, reveals their deepest fears and anxieties." The film was "inspired by my own experiences as a child, growing up surrounded by relatives struggling with Samoan and Western cultures."

Lil Paypa (2001, 4 min, video, color, b/w)
Directors: Sanipepa Mali Mali and Van Nguyen
Lil Paypa is a prose poem about betrayal, anger, and healing. Shared by Sanipepa Mali Mali, the words are straight from the life of a young Tongan woman growing up in East Palo Alto.

Anjali Arondekar is Assistant Professor of Critical Race Studies in the Department of Women’s Studies at UCSC. She was the Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Smith College from 1999-2001, and her research interests include queer theory, South Asia studies, critical race studies and Victorian studies. She has published variously in Postmodern Culture, Symploke, Journal of Asian Studies and the Village Voice, and is currently working on a book-project entitled A Perverse Empire: Victorian Sexuality and India.

Teaiwa's Kainga (2001, 20 min, video, color)

Director and Performer: Katerina Teaiwa
Rabi Island in Fiji is the home of Teaiwa's family, as well as the displaced population originally from Banaba in Kiribati. They were removed from their island first by the Japanese during World War II and then by the British Government soon after. Banaba was mined for phosphate from 1900 to 1980 by a conglomeration of British, Australian and New Zealand Agricultural and Colonial interests. Though the Banaban people have since made new lives for themselves on Rabi, relationships are fraught at the economic, political, cultural and spiritual levels. The 5000 Rabi Islanders are a mixture of Banaban, Gilbertese, Tuvaluan, European, Fijian, Japanese and Chinese heritage. Teaiwa illustrates this hybridity in the film through a collage of sounds, images and conversations. This dance performance following the video reflects Teaiwa's distance from and connection to Rabi. Born and raised in Suva City Teaiwa learns what it means to be incorporated physically and psychically into the community.

Katerina Teaiwa is a Banaban/Gilbertese/African American woman from Fiji. She did her MA in Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai’i and is currently doing a PhD in Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra.