Shown in Butches and Femmes shorts
July at Outfest Los Angeles
Interview by Xkiller.
For Tokyo Wrestling http://www.tokyowrestling.com/
At house in Silverlake.
AM: Also known as La Chocha…
XK: La Chocha, si…
(Tape recorder difficulties and laughing. More laughs about how she had slept on a similar Ikea pull out sofa bed for 2 1/2 years in a drug infested apartment in Paris.)
XK: Was this when you just moved to Paris?
AM: No, I moved to Paris in 1993. I was 23.
XK: And tell me again, why ‘Paree’?
AM: It’s unexplainable but I found different rationales for it, I loved the history, I love France, and…also because I’m Cuban and I spoke Spanish at home and I was raised in America with an Anglo Saxon thing… I don’t like too much Latin and I don’t like too much Anglo, and France is like a mixture where you have Anglo intellectualism with Latin emotionalism.
There are so many paradoxes in France that I love everything it exemplifies.
Wherever you live tells a lot about you, and I like that. There’s a weird nonconformity about living in Paris…it gives all these romantic images and at the same time it’s kind of difficult. In New York, only the strong survive, in Paris only the strong survive too.
But in a more finesse way, whereas in New York, if you’re tough enough, if you’re strong enough, you can break down the doors. In Paris that doesn’t really work, you have to learn this kind of finesse about explaining what you’re doing, what you’re doing, and then just like any major city, being tough, learning by getting beat up, how to survive.
XK: Interesting…
AM: …And the women….I’ve only fallen in love with French women. It’s not an easy burden. (shaking head) Not a light burden..
I totally get it
XK: And there you are in France of all places.. (god I’m good!)
AM: You have a light?
(Anna lights up her ultra white trash out here, but uber cool in Europe, Capri cigarette. We smoke together)
XK: So wait, I wrote notes about you, I went to your myspace. [ I am semi scolded for not reading all of her blogs. Because if I had, I would have found out, as Anna tells me, of her unbridled passion for Barbara Streisand, and how she, [like tons of other panic stricken homos] rushed to one of Babs’ fifty ‘last show EVER’s’. We swap Yentl stories… ]
AM: Yeah I told my mom I wanna be ‘Jewban’. [Much to the horror of her mother].
AM: Hachoo!
XK: Salud! I read that you got a third place audience award in Toronto in the ‘Bad Grrrl’s’ program for ‘A Lez in Wonderland’….that’s amazing…
AM: Yes, that was awesome.
XK: So how did Canal Plus [pronounced ‘canal ploos’] pick you up for that?
AM: I studied TV and media and then I got into film school and I then wanted to go to Paris….in America I was learning ‘goal, goal, goal,’ and in the 90’s it was like ‘oh, you wanna be the youngest filmmaker?’…all these things started happening… independent films started happening, and it was like try to get there as fast as possible. ‘Go, go go!’… and all of a sudden, I was like, look I did it, and my family didn’t have any money, I paid for my college, I had like 3 jobs, but I don’t wanna keep goin so fast, I wanna enjoy life, but I also knew I had to relearn life. [Referring to US and France:] Here you live to work, and over there you work to live, and that’s why the French have minimum wage, but they have 5 weeks paid vacation, plus you have a paid 13th month, and a two hour lunch…
XK: A two hour lunch! I don’t know if I’d come back!
AM: [Laughs] But you do…It’s really made for living well and still working and making money. I started with video…I’m really a do it yourself filmmaker, that’s really my path after the official education of college. I did a lot of free workshops, like teaching girls how to do it. My first job in Paris, I was working for Sony video…and everyone says ‘I wanna make a film, but I don’t have the money’, and I was like ‘today, compared to like 10 -15 years ago, you have a video camera, you have a computer, you can make a movie!’
And even before you make a movie, make short movies, the 3 things you have to do is: do it, edit it, meaning finish it, and then you show it. The important thing is to finish it and show it. Most people film it and then don’t finish it. And if they finish it, they don’t show it. Even if you show it to five friends in your living room, the important thing is to show it and to send it to film festivals.
There are so few lesbians sending, there may be a lot of lesbians making it, but I’ve been doing film festivals for 11 years, and if you do show it, try as much as possible to be there, and if you can be there, try as much as possible to force them to let you do a question and answer, or at least to present you so people know who you are, so you can have that discussion, a dialogue with the people who see it. Even if it sucks, but every time you see it with other people, you see it another way…you start absorbing, and get into a different point of view, and all that helps you objectively see your film. Money is not an excuse. Time is not even an excuse.
XK: True, I think if you really want to do something, you will find a way. With fashion, I just started doing it. I just started doing fashion shows at local clubs and selling out of my house and my truck. It all depends on your drive.
AM: Exactly. And also I think the main thing that hampers everyone from doing anything is the fear of being ridiculous. You know it’s like, it’s not even really failure, it’s of being perceived as ridiculous, the idea of being ridiculed…it’s like, who cares if someone’s gonna say ‘no’, you know that somewhere along the line someone’s gonna say ‘yes’.
[and just as we are talking about failure, my dear friend Amanda, of AmandaFailurePrincess.com, is peering in the window. Gasp! I think it’s neighbor crack head Tony high as b’Jesus peering in with beckoning eyes for a cigarette. I see her curly hair and calm down. After a quick scolding, Manda comes in and kicks it.]
XK: You scared the shit outa me!
AM: She scared the shit outa me too!
AFP: Sorry guys…
XK: So yeah, fuckin’ good shit. [Profound as always]
AM: It’s like the same, HBO and Canal Plus, out here, that’s who does the original programming, the amazing, groundbreaking…
XK: Did they contact you?
AM: No. The thing is this film is the result of many years of trying to break into… from underground video and film maker and performance artist and you know…to serious filmmaker. This film cost 8000 euros, which is like 100,000 dollars. This is the first time I dealt with that much of a budget.
[She explains how European film venues wouldn’t take her seriously because she was from America, and thought she was just going to leave. No one wants to invest their time in young Americans with big Euro film dreams. But Anna kept on showing at film festivals and finally…]
… I wanted to show them it wasn’t just a lark or just a fling. So they had asked ten lesbian filmmakers from around the world to do a ten minute short doc on their city. I never did a documentary so I kind of invented it, and the idea of a reporter.
XK: Was this the Dinah thing?
AM: No, it was on lesbian life in Los Angeles. They liked it, and then two years later, they said ‘give us a proposal’, so I gave them the Michigan thing, [the annual Michigan Women’s Music Festival] and they said ‘No. We don’t want those kind of lesbians, they are too ugly, we don’t want to see this type of lesbian…’
Michigan or bust!!
XK:[Laughing or rather guffawing stupidly]
AM: They said ‘We want Dinah Shore’. So last year I said ‘fuck it’, I wanted to do a thing on the lipstick lesbian revolution…they loved it… ‘We learned so much from your 12 page presentation… but we don’t want a 60 minute documentary. We want you in front of the camera, we want you to make us laugh, we wanna know what it is, who goes there, and what’s it about. And we want everyone at the end of the film to wanna go there.’ So now I had to write myself into this serious documentary I had written, and that’s when I came back and I said to them, ‘Ok, I’m a mime, the screen’s black…I’m in the dessert….It’s a metaphor for looking for other women…’ And I did my pitch and …it was just so crazy that they said yes to everything I wanted…. ‘I want a convertible, I need money for clothes, I need a haircut, facial…’
[Damn Chocha! That’s way more primming than any lesbian I’ve ever seen at Dinah!]
[Anna also got them to agree to an all American lesbian film crew.]
AM: I didn’t want to take a French film crew, I wanted to give lesbians jobs, but I also didn’t know how women would react at a lesbian weekend having fun, getting drunk, trying to get laid, and here I am ‘hi, I’m from French television can you tell me your most intimate details?’ but it was the contrary..…It was fascinating.
[Referring to Europe’s Canal Plus]
The audience is mainly a straight audience….so I had to do something for a straight audience, but I wanted also to, because I am a lesbian cultural militant, and all my intellectual friends and also for lesbians that are not in the know, I wanted to make something that was interesting to them too. A lot of gay guys in Paris when we showed it were like, ‘Oh my god! I never knew lesbians could be funny’…but at the same time lesbians still suffer from the stigma, we’re not funny, we don’t know how to dress, we’re not fun, we’re angry, not sexy…and so I wanted to address all this stuff. I knew Dinah Shore had that.
But when I went to Dinah Shore I thought it was a lipstick lesbian event, you know, only the type of lesbians mostly from Los Angeles, but there was all types of women, and I wanted to show from different countries, classes, races, clicks…and that’s what I thought was awesome… The great thing about it was they [Canal Plus] had faith in me, they let me do what I wanted to do, and I feel I really succeeded in doing it.
XK: Well I’m so glad they had you write yourself into it, because I felt it was your spirit, your personality that carried it. It was amazing, my fuckin’ cheeks hurt for hours. And I’m so glad I went to my first Dinah this year, so I could totally relate better. What I also thought was really cool was when you focused on the girl whose mom was gay, and also focused on her story.
AM: Education through comedy, that’s my documentary style. Here, I am going to give you a scoop….
I had a meeting with Here TV on Monday and the Head of Acquisitions came to the [Butches and Femmes] screening on Tuesday and they wanted to buy it, and we’re in negotiations to do a six part episode for their season…
XK: [The opportunist that I am:] How can I be in it, in the banana suit????
AM: Well, what really interests me now is to do things all over the continent, you know go and discover a place in South America, like Buenos Aires…
XK: Like Dinah’s of the world???
AM: But not like Dinah, the idea is a show that’s made specifically for lesbians, but whatever’s goin on in lesbian culture in whatever place I’m in. You know, like Tokyo, Moscow, Buenos Aires, South Africa… like an exotic travel show, but you find out about the culture and what’s goin on. And they were like ‘that’s what we want.’ They don’t just want parties...
[We talk about our mutual friend Guinevere Turner, who is featured in a most comedic pre- party lipstick lesbian montage for a second. I haven’t told Anna about ‘Guin-fest’ yet. Wait, did the banana thing just get cleverly avoided??]
Teaser for, "Alez in Wonderland"
AM: There’s nothing like Dinah Shore, there’s nothing in the world like it. Over 10 – 12 thousand women. Yeah, it’s a fine line cuz a lot of people were drunk. I didn’t wanna exploit anyone for anything, but it’s so hard because we always have our guards up, and I was so worried, cuz I didn’t want to fuck around with them or waste their time, but everyone was amazing, everyone was so generous. Even in the lesbian bars, I don’t even know if I’ve lived such generosities as I lived at Dinah Shore.
So now I sadly say bon voyage to my new, brilliant, multi-talented filmmaker friend, but of course after we pound a few dollar beers over at Shotgun. Beforehand, I was honored to fulfill Anna's request for a 'Feed Shane' beater, ah memories of MY first Dinah, oh and look out France!
Anna, a good friend, moi, and Amanda Failure Princess
at Gaunty (photo by: Mr. Party)
So inspired was I after our little interview, and so excited to have met such an innovative, clever, diy, filmmaker and human being. Viva la Chocha!!! Till Guin-fest ’08….. Oooh, I can't wait!!
For more Eagle LA/Gaunty fotos of this nite click here!
For more on Anna and her film, please check out:
http://myspace.com/annalachocha
0 comments:
Post a Comment