The locally themed short films "Kindred" and "Being Lisa" have been honored with "Hometown" awards by the Alliance for Community Media in Washington, D.C. The films were made as part of Access Sacramento's 2007 "A Place Called Sacramento" program, which asks filmmakers to compose 10-minute shorts with local themes.
"Kindred" (shown below via YouTube) imagines a physician whose vivid dreams evoke the 1850 cholera epidemic in Sacramento. The film's director, Sacramento graphic designer Scott Howe, 43, arrived at the idea for the film while his father was in the hospital getting his kidney removed. He came up with a location while working at his former job at California State University, Sacramento.
"I noticed that the basement of the library building looked just like a hospital,"
says Howe, who now works for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
"Being Lisa" (below) involves a fledgling romance between and man and a transgender woman who meet over a business dinner.
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The experience of making "Being Lisa" convinced co-director/co-writer Becca Louisell, 34, who works for a local nonprofit, to apply to film school.
The project helped inspire her to "get work out there that has some kind of meaning," says Louisell, who co-wrote the film with Gene Hoisington, Steven Bourasa and the film's star, Amara Stefani, and directed it with Hoisington and Bourasa. She since has been accepted into the prestigious USC film program.
"Kindred" and "Being Lisa" will be honored in the "cultural perspectives" and "gay/lesbian" professional categories, respectively, at the ACM "Hometown" awards ceremony July 10 in Washington.
For information on the 2008 "A Place Called Sacramento" contest, now in the production stage, go to www.accesssacramento.org.
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