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Cinequest 18 highlights De Anza students and alumnus

By Heather Zimmerman

Cupertino is a hotspot for techies, but it may also be a wellspring of up-and-coming auteurs. De Anza College's Film and Television department attracts students from around the world, as well as local talents, and some of these filmmakers are already getting noticed.

Audiences can catch the works of two De Anza film students during the 18th edition of the Cinequest film festival, taking place Feb. 27-March 9 in downtown San Jose.

The short films of De Anza students Indukuri Meena and Omar Forero will be shown in Cinequest's Student Film Competition. The films will screen Feb. 28, 7:30 p.m. and March 2, 10:30 a.m.

Since De Anza began participating in 2002, it has been one of the few community colleges regularly represented in the competition, often alongside institutions at the graduate and post-graduate levels. "Most of our films end up competing and sharing film space with graduate film projects, so the fact that they can hold up well against that kind of competition is pretty amazing," De Anza film faculty member Susan Tavernetti says.

Meena's entry for Cinequest's student competition is her animated short, Final Performance.

Forero used an experimental approach for his short film, Try. "It is difficult to say what it is about," Forero says. "I think it is a story of sensations more than ideas."

Forero, a filmmaker from Trujillo, Peru, came to California for the experience of living abroad. Although he already had made movies using video, he says went to De Anza to learn how to shoot on film. Forero has since returned to Peru, where he's working on a feature project called The Sellers. Try was also screened at the aluCine festival in Toronto.

Participating in a film festival gives students confidence in their work, Tavernetti says, and offers a chance to network. Cinequest hosts a number of workshops and events, and meeting professional filmmakers in this setting can show students what's possible in their own careers. "I think it just makes their goals more tangible," Tavernetti says.

Students can take inspiration from Kurt Kuenne, a De Anza alumnus who graduated from the University of Southern California film school and has been working professionally for more than a dozen years as a director, screenwriter and composer.

Kuenne won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' prestigious Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting in 2002 for his screenplay Mason Mule, and he recently signed an option with a production company to direct a film based on that script.

A Bay Area native who now lives near Los Angeles, Kuenne is no stranger to Cinequest audiences. Since 1996 the festival has screened nine films that he wrote and directed, or scored--or all of the above.

Kuenne will show two films at Cinequest 18, his short film The Phone Book and his documentary Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father.

The Phone Book is part of Kuenne's series of short comedies that have been well received on the festival circuit. The shorts are all created as stand-alone stories, but feature intertwining characters and plotlines, so that they can also be watched together.

The Phone Book is literally an adaptation of the phone book--a riff on an old Hollywood joke. "It's very faithful to the source material," Kuenne says. "Every line of dialogue is a name, address, phone number or piece of ad copy set in sequence, and those have to carry the plot."

The Phone Book will show as part of a shorts program on March 5, 9 p.m. and March 8, noon.

Cinequest will mark the first Bay Area screening of Dear Zachary, a documentary with strong South Bay roots and a deeply personal connection for Kuenne.

In 2001, Dr. Andrew Babgy, Kuenne's close friend since childhood, was murdered. Shirley Turner, Bagby's ex-girlfriend and the mother of his unborn child, was the suspected killer. Turner fled to Newfoundland, Canada, and gave birth to a son, Zachary. Kuenne began filming a documentary of Bagby's life for Zachary, drawing on footage that he had taken over the years as he and Bagby grew up together in the South Bay.

As Turner awaited extradition to the United States to stand trial for Bagby's murder, she caused further tragedy, which has given Dear Zachary a second purpose. Kuenne hopes to spur reform of Canada's bail laws.

Dear Zachary premiered in January at the Slamdance independent film festival to very positive reviews, in part for its unusually personal point of view, a departure for many documentaries. "It would be dishonest for me to tell it any other way," Kuenne says. "This is how I experienced it and that's all I can do."

Bagby's parents, Kate and David Bagby, who are longtime Sunnyvale residents, will be on hand for the film's local showings: March 1, 7 p.m., March 2, 6:30 p.m. and March 3, 4:30 p.m. "I'm really excited about this being the Bay Area premiere for Dear Zachary because the film is about a Bay Area family," Kuenne says, noting that the screening will allow many of the Bagbys' close friends to see the film for the first time.

Following Cinequest, Dear Zachary will show at Austin's South by Southwest festival and at the Sarasota Film Festival. Kuenne is close to sealing a distribution deal for the film.

For more information about screenings and locations, visit www.cinequest.org.