Asian Pacific Health Care Venture, Inc. will serve as Community Co-Presenter at the 27th Annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival
April 6, 2011
Asian Pacific Health Care Venture, Inc. is proud to be a Community Co-Presenter of the 27th Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF) which will take place beginning April 28th through May 7th. As Southern California’s largest and most prestigious film festival of its kind, the LAAPFF, established by Visual Communications, launches the celebration of Asian Pacific Heritage Month through this year’s slate of 180 films from both Asian Pacific American and Asian international directors from 20 countries. Over the past 27 years, the Festival has presented over 3400 films and shorts by Asian American and Asian international artists. This year, 32 feature films and 148 shorts will be showcased throughout the 10-day fest. The Festival will showcase many returning filmmakers and producers who continue to make films and still hold true to their own voices as exemplified by our Opening Night, Closing Night and Centerpiece galas.
This year, Asian Pacific Health Care Venture, Inc. will partner with the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival as a Community Co-Presenter for the film “THE LULU SESSIONS,” a work about limits: Where are the limits between the private and the public? Where are the limits of human life and love? Where, finally, are the limits between you and me? Director S. Casper Wong does not feed us with answers. She works through these questions with great labor herself. She touches upon, challenges, gives up and redefines them constantly — and she does so in a bold, raging, cautious, fearful and confident manner. THE LULU SESSIONS is a personal documentary, at once biographical and autobiographical. Shot during the last 15 months of the life of cancer researcher Dr. Louise Nutter, THE LULU SESSIONS offers us insight not only into a deeply connected relationship but the beginning of an intimacy between two women that outgrows our understanding of friendship and partnership – and maybe even life. Raised at a small farm in Vermont, Nutter is the epitome of a high flyer. A passionate individual and academic workaholic, she a successful, much-loved, chain-smoking professor and cancer researcher who has just discovered a new anti-cancer drug. And is then diagnosed with severe breast cancer herself.
Witnessing the changes of Lulu's body, her breasts taken away, hair shortened and falling out, her presence slowly diminishing in the loss of weight, we see life's and love's entanglement with death. We feel the camera's anxiety to lose any moment of Lulu's incredibly charming and challenging personality to forgetfulness. And we understand THE LULU SESSIONS to be a creation of memory and a thinking of death, a confrontation with our greatest human fears, too. At times reminiscent of Peter Friedman and Tom Joslin's SILVERLAKE LIFE, Wong's film equally captures an intimacy, which disallows the attitude of voyeuristic comfort and safety. And yet refrains from sentimentalizing gestures of nostalgia and simplifying images of suffering. The documentary does not take the pain and the fear away, but it makes them graspable, approachable, liveable, and it contextualizes the simultaneous beginning and growth of a unique love within the wider sociopolitical context of women's self-identification. THE LULU SESSIONS is not only a work about limits, but, at least for many moments, their very suspension.
Join Asian Pacific Health Care Venture, Inc. for a screening of THE LULU SESSIONS, on Saturday, April 30th at 7:30 pm at the Director’s Guild of America, Theater 2. Tickets can be purchased online, by phone or in person. Please visit the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival website for more information at http://laapff.festpro.com/films/detail/the_lulu_sessions_2011.
Asian Pacific Health Care Venture, Inc. (www.aphcv.org) located in Hollywood and serving the greater Los Angeles area, is a Federally Qualified Health Center that provides culturally competent health education and primary care services to over 12,000 patients annually, more than 77% of whom are uninsured. APHCV provides over 46,400 medical and mental health visits each year in multiple Asian languages (Bengali, Cantonese, Hindi, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Indonesian, Mandarin, Tagalog, Thai, Urdu, and Vietnamese), English and Spanish. APHCV can be reached at (323) 644-3880. Medical appointments can be made by calling (323) 644-3888.
Visual Communication’s (www.vcoline.org) mission is to promote intercultural understanding through the creation, presentation and support of media works by and about Asian Pacific Americans. VC was created with the understanding that media and the arts are important vehicles to organize and empower communities, build connections between generations, challenge perspectives, and create an environment for critical thinking necessary to build a more just and humane society. For more information, call Robyn Shultz at (213) 680-4462 ext. 30.
