Film Rap: PROTAGONIST w/ Jessica Yu

Many thanks to the jaunty Jessica Y!

The Henry Art Gallery.

This event presented in conjunction with TheFilmSchool.

**Please note: Oscar®-winning filmmaker Jessica Yu will join Warren Etheredge of The Warren Report for an exclusive, extended — and possibly antagonistic? — post-show discussion about her unique approach to story-telling, whether fact or fiction.**

PROTAGONIST explores extremism through contrasting stories of personal revelation. The film features four individuals who have been devoted to personal odysseys – a cause, a quest, an ideal – to the point of total consumption. At first glance the characters appear disconnected: a former German terrorist, an “ex-gay” evangelist, a bank robber and a martial arts student. But as their stories unfold, one starts to see the parallels between the uncommon, common experience of these four men. Each character embarks on a journey for valid reasons, only to find himself so deeply embedded in the cause that he becomes the opposite of what he had intended. He is blind to this fact, though, until the forces of fate and character boil and distill to a single moment of dark epiphany. In telling this echoing story, the film asks: what is the path to extremism? In responding to the turmoil of life, where does one draw the line between the reasonable and the unreasonable? And how does one recover from the delusion of certainty?

The four stories in PROTAGONIST are told in parallel threads and structured like a multi-layered Greek drama. Directed by Jessica Yu and produced by Yu, Elise Pearlstein and Susan West, this adventurous documentary is inspired by the works of the 5th century playwright Euripides. The film uses quotes from his plays as thematic chapter headings, providing a provocative common link between our contemporary stories and lending them a timeless quality. Wooden rod puppets, modeled after ancient Greek theater masks and designed by Janie Geiser, stage both the play excerpts and scenes from our subjects’ pasts. The film also features intricate title animation by Robert Conner, music by Jeff Beal and voiceover performance in ancient Greek by Marina Sirtis and Chris Diamantopolous

For the PROTAGONIST trailer and more info, please visit http://www.protagonistthemovie.com/.

Jessica Yu is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She won the 1997 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short for BREATHING LESSONS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF MARK O’BRIEN, an intimate portrait of the writer who lived for four decades paralyzed by polio and confined to an iron lung. The film also won over 20 festival awards, including the IDA Achievement Award, the Audience Award at Aspen Shortsfest, and First Prize at the St. Petersburg International Film Festival, since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival. She also won an Emmy and a Cable Ace Award for Best Documentary Director.

Yu’s documentary, PROTAGONIST, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL, Yu’s celebrated feature documentary about the enigmatic “outsider” artist Henry Darger, debuted in competition at Sundance. REALMS won Best Documentary at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Best Documentary at the Newport Beach Film Festival, Best Editing at the Atlanta Film Festival and a Gotham Award nomination for Best Documentary. She was also nominated for the Writers Guild Award for Documentary Screenplay. Released nationally by Wellspring Films and broadcast on PBS’ independent documentary series, P.O.V., REALMS was nominated for P.O.V.’s first Primetime Emmy Award (Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking) and featured on several publications’ 2004 “top ten” lists, including the Christian Science Monitor.

Yu’s film THE LIVING MUSEUM, the award-winning HBO documentary about an art community in a New York mental institution, premiered at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Yu’s narrative short BETTER LATE was the debut film for the fXM Shorts Series. It has been featured in 60 festivals since its premiere at Sundance 1997, and it won First Prize for Short Drama at the New York Festivals. Her other films include MEN OF REENACTION, a documentary about Civil War reenactors, for which she received grants from ITVS and NEA; the popular black & white short SOUR DEATH BALLS, which won several awards, including Best Live Action Short at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, was featured at Berlin, Sundance, Telluride, Toronto, San Francisco, Sydney and the national PBS series ALIVE TV; THE CONDUCTOR, a musical comedy short featuring Mark Salzman (IRON AND SILK) and the documentary HOME BASE, winner of several festival awards. She also directs commercials with Nonfiction Spots of Santa Monica, for which she has won a New York Emmy.

Yu has also written articles and fiction for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Buzz, Worth, and the Pacific News Service. She received the Murrow Award for Journalism from the Skeptics Society, the DREAM Media Award from the Western Law Center for Disability Rights and ACV’s Asian American Media Award. She has lectured at various universities and conferences. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a Yaddo Fellow. Yu graduated from Yale University, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, with a B.A. in English.

In 2008, Yu released her first narrative feature, PING PONG PLAYA a comedy she has co-wrote with Jimmy Tsai.

Her latest short, KINDA SUTRA debuted at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.