Last night, NYU’s Casa Italiana hosted the program Everynobody’s Business: Experience in

Last night, NYU’s Casa Italiana hosted the program Everynobody’s Business: Experience in Place, Home and Family, a collection of seven contemporary Asian American experimental and documentary short films. The films all focus on exploring the concepts of home, place, memory and culture. Despite being in the same program, the films varied greatly in their style and focus.

One of the films was by award-winning experimental media artist and current Maryland Institute College of Art staff member Agnes Moon. Her film “Dream of Me” is an expression of her own personal struggle to find identity and acceptance.

“It’s always a pleasure to screen your work,” Moon said. “Especially when you’re doing experimental media and working on niche issues.”

She said she wanted to make a film that was an expression of loss and ignorance.

The event was curated by Chi-hui Yang, a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

“So much of Asian American cinema explores notions of family and location, but with this set of films, I wanted to showcase several creative and formally innovative approaches,” Yang said. “We have filmmakers playing with performance, sound, self-portraits, all in attempts to get closer to a kind of emotional truth.”

Film screenings included Ina Adele Ray’s documentary “El Paso Vietnam” based on her Vietnamese-American parent’s relationship and Larilyn Sanchez’s film “Balikbayan” about the tradition of Filipino workers sending gifts back home to family members and relatives.

For Sanchez, the topic of this film is personal. The focus, she said, “is about migration and migrant workers. My father came here from the Philippines.”

The longest film in the program was Yoni Brook’s “A Son’s Sacrifice,” which focused on a Muslim family’s slaughterhouse and the struggle of their American-born son, Imran Uddin, to prove that he is worthy to take over the business. The film zones in on the days leading up to the Muslim holiday Qurbani, a day of sacrifice. Elements of this film include Uddin’s need to feel accepted within the Muslim community despite having a Puerto Rican mother, and the cultural and generational clash that occurs between Uddin and his father.

What these various films all have in common is their desire to convey to the viewer, in an Asian-American context, the struggle of immigrant families to find identity. Though each film deals with a different aspect of Asian-American culture and conflict, they all search for a clarity of meaning within each story.

http://www.nyunews.com/life/2012/03/02/02film/