2022

An Ocean Unites Us

LUX

This year’s Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award challenges young LA filmmakers to explore how the Pacific reflects and makes the city. Rebecca Anne Proctor reports on the winners and the stories they tell in their films.



‘Sit in Water, Float in Peace’ by Alyse Arteaga. (stills from films shortlisted for the Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award) ‘Surface’ by Ciara Zoe (stills from films shortlisted for the Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award) Still from Jane Chow’s entry for the award, ‘Sorry for the Inconvenience’, which won the popular vote in the initiative’s Audience Award


A young woman with long, brown hair watches the waves as they break along a stretch of beach. She faces the ocean at daybreak. Just as the sun sets, turning the sky a soft pastel pink, the woman is suddenly seen amidst glistening skyscrapers. A foreigner in a new country, she is here, on the other side of an ocean, ready to begin a new life in a new land. A body of water serves to both separate and connect not only distinct parts of the earth, but the human beings that reside at either end. Palestinian-American director John Rizkallah’s film Dear Mama evocatively portrays this young Middle Eastern woman as she recounts her first experience of living in Los Angeles to her mother back home. Rizkallah’s film, haunting in its cinematography, shares a powerful message for the times we are living in: you can never forget your homeland nor the culture from which you have come.

“As a child my mother would take us to the ocean all the time; she loved the ocean,” recalls Rizkallah, whose family moved a year before he was born from Gaza to the United States. “She grew up in Gaza, which is right by the Mediterranean, so she was always by the ocean. When she moved to California, her dream was to live by the ocean. Every time we watched the sun set, she would say, ‘Say bye to the sun, it is going to see your grandmother’.”

It was a thought that stuck with him. Rizkallah’s grandmother was in Gaza, thousands of miles of way, across long stretches of water. His mother’s words inspired him to create Dear Mama. “I wanted to make a story about how little details anywhere can remind you of home.”

 

You can never forget the culture from which you have come



His grandmother left Gaza six years ago and now lives in the United States.

In June this year, Rizkallah won the second annual Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award. For this year’s prize, emerging LA- based filmmakers aged 18 to 34 were asked to produce a film exploring the city’s environment and its relationship with the ocean, a prompt that inspired Rizkallah and Jane Chow, winner of the initiative’s inaugural Audience Award voted for by the public, to reflect on how the nature of water in their adopted city recalled the water in their respective home cities of Gaza and Hong Kong.

Realised in collaboration with Endeavor Content and non-profit Ghetto Film School (GFS), the award offers a platform and programme for emerging LA-based filmmakers. Rizkallah was awarded the $10,000 prize by a panel including producer Stephanie Allain; Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem; Alana Mayo, president of Orion Pictures; and actor, musician and producer Naomi Scott. Working alongside them were representatives from Deutsche Bank, Frieze and GFS.

Amidst the unforeseen adversity of global lockdowns and restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic, preparation for the award took place with filmmakers, jurors and mentors collaborating with each other largely in the virtual realm. The awards ceremony was also held virtually. “In just the second year of the award, the standard of films is so high that it has made the job of juror a pleasure,” says Amanda Sharp, co-founder of Frieze. “John Rizkallah and Jane Chow have been rightly recognised for their thoughtful and poignant work. However, I also want to extend congratulations to all the filmmakers who took part in the fellowship this year. Every single participant has madefantastic work under the most restrictive conditions and should be commended for both their resilience and creativity.”

The award is also the product of Deutsche Bank’s 18-year partnership with Frieze, through which the bank has been supporting the company’s fairs around the world as well as various other cultural initiatives. It is a relationship that the bank says it is “committed to for the long term”. It also underlines Deutsche Bank’s championing of emerging and established artists over the past four decades. “The Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award not only reinforces that ethos, but it also enables us to support the Los Angeles community which would not exist without the vibrant energy of young filmmakers such as these,” Anna Herrhausen, Global Head of Deutsche Bank Art, Culture and Sports, says.

“John’s film touched me deeply as a person who also left his country as a young man to look for fortune elsewhere,” adds Claudio de Sanctis, Head of International Private Bank and CEO EMEA at Deutsche Bank.

Jane Chow, an LA-based filmmaker originally from Hong Kong, received the first Audience Award, worth $2,500, for the film chosen by the public as their favourite of all the films made by this year’s fellows.

Based in LA’s Chinatown, Chow’s film, Sorry for the Inconvenience, tells the tale of a lonely teenager as she tries to help her parents keep their seafood restaurant afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic. As she packs takeout orders, chops greens and prepares dishes, she strives to retain some level of normality, which she can sense is quickly slipping away. Even activities
such as studying for her driver’s licence and prepping for her high-school Zoom theatre debut in The Tempest are not enough. Life as she knows it is changing fast.

“The way I interpreted the fellowship’s prompt was through my perspective as an outsider in Los Angeles,” said Chow. “As someone who grew up in Hong Kong and who moved to America without family or citizenship, I’ve always found a home in Los Angeles Chinatown, getting to know the people who came before me.”

Talking about growing up in Hong Kong, Chow says that some of her best memories are of the seafood restaurants and eating fresh fish by the harbour. Chow learned how, since the late 1800s, Chinese Americans had established some of the first commercial fisheries in California, bringing recipes and traditions from places such as Hong Kong.

“With this film, I wanted to pay tribute to LA Chinatown and its relationship to the ocean,” she adds. “I specifically wanted to show this in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, because over the past year, many immigrant- owned family businesses have been struggling to stay open. On top of that, LA Chinatown had already been facing gentrification for years.” With Sorry for the Inconvenience, Chow hopes to “humanise the families behind these restaurants,” showing how their fight to stay afloat is one that tells of both their resilience and vulnerability.

“Hong Kong is going through a lot right now, and it makes me think about what I can do with my privilege as a filmmaker living in the US,” said Chow. “I want to help uphold the stories of my home and also explore the voices of the growing Hong Kong diaspora.”


“We work to tell stories of those whose perspective may often go unheard”


The filmmakers were assisted by mentors at GFS, founded 21 years ago in New York City and now with bases in London, and Los Angeles as well. “Our mission is to educate and develop next-generation filmmakers and artists working in the medium of film,” said Sharese Bullock-Bailey, the GFS chief strategy and partnership officer. “We designed a support system and fellowship in collaboration with Frieze to train young filmmakers like Chow and Rizkallah. As part of these initiatives, we work to tell stories that have yet to be told through the lens and voices of those whose perspectives may often go unheard. What I love about both Chow and Rizkallah’s films is that they embrace a humanity and identity that is uniquely American and universal.”

During these fractious times, when communities around the world are more divided than ever over issues concerning race and identity politics, art plays a powerful role in illuminating such concerns – even amidst great adversity. In the case of these films, questions pertaining to migrant communities in the United States and the importance of one’s identity and homeland couldn’t be stronger.

After the 18 months the world has just experienced, the need for community and cross-cultural understanding and development is paramount. Together, these films serve as a means by which such connections can be made, just as the ocean unifies the disparate, far-flung parts of the earth.