Streetside Productions and Oakland’s Own Youth Digital Filmmakers Present

I AIN'T LEAVIN'

Followed by a discussion with 4 of the 6 youth filmmakers.

12:00PM - 1:00PM on Friday, June 26th, 2009

SCA 110, George Lucas Building
School of Cinematic Arts Complex
900 W. 34th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90007

FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL.

MAKE A RESERVATION

ABOUT I AIN'T LEAVIN'
Running time: 20 minutes

For the better part of a year, a diverse crew of six young filmmakers spent their afternoons and weekends making a documentary film about Cambodians growing up in the impoverished Oak Park Apartments in the San Antonio District of East Oakland, home to many recent immigrants. The 20-minute film, I Ain't Leavin’, describes the youth’s struggle for balance and security in a neighborhood where residents cope with gangs on one hand and neighborhood gentrification on the other.

"The film is about what ‘home’ means, and why Oak Park is so important to Cambodians like me,” said 19-year-old Maria San, one of the filmmakers who also narrates the film. “Things have changed for me and my friends over the years. You used to see little kids and Cambodian families hanging out in the courtyard. Now, all you see is the police telling us we can’t be here.”


The young filmmakers made the film in a digital arts internship program of the East Bay Asian Youth Center, Streetside Productions, that trains youth in digital storytelling, documentary video production, photography and media arts. The program targets multiracial, high-risk youth from throughout Oakland and promotes storytelling from a youth perspective.

“When we began this project, the crew was all about telling the story of young people versus the police, but after a year of interviewing, researching, presenting rough cuts and editing, they realized that their story existed within a much bigger context of displacement, gentrification and cultural identity,” said CB Smith-Dahl, Filmmaker and Instructor at Streetside Productions.

Elaine H. Kim, professor of Asian American Studies at UC Berkeley, was an advisor on the film. “As our humanities scholar, Elaine helped keep the story grounded in the human experience, and asked the youth important questions, like, "Will it make sense to those outside of Oakland?" and "What do you think the parents and older generation of Oak Park are thinking?" explained Peter Kim, East Bay Asian Youth Center's managing director of Streetside Productions.

4 of the 6 Oakland Youth Digital Filmmakers who shot, directed, and edited the movie will travel to Los Angeles to host a Q&A screening at the Los Angeles Film Festival with two other YDF teams (San Francisco and Siskiyou County). These filmmakers are all young women of color: Maria San, Mercedes Hill, Yen Nguyen, and Daniella Rodriguez. In many ways, this project is a full circle event for the sponsors of the Los Angeles Film Festival – Film Independent (FIND). The project’s filmmaker mentor, is a graduate of FIND’s Project: Involve – a program that aims to increase diversity in the film business. Ms. Smith-Dahl is also a graduate of the School of Cinematic Arts at USC, where she earned an MFA.

Youth Digital Filmmakers is part of the Council’s How I See It campaign designed to give California youth an opportunity to explore community and personal issues and present their thoughts, ideas and discoveries to the public. The Council said that more than 75 organizations applied to participate in the program, which was conducted in partnership with the Digital Storytelling Institute of ZeroDivide.