Jessica Yu has created some of the finest and most formally innovative documentaries of the past decade, such as In the Realms of the Unreal (2004) and Protagonist (2007). Her latest film Misconception, which had its world premiere at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, is somewhat of a step down from these in formal terms, as it is much closer to traditional documentaries than her previous work. Still, Jessica Yu brings considerable style and verve to her examination of the issue of the world population explosion, with a triptych of compelling stories that bring the vast parameters of this complex and often overwhelming issue down to a human level. Also, the film provocatively challenges received wisdom about the actual nature of the problem of overpopulation,...
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- 6/22/2016
- Screen Anarchy
Jessica Yu has created some of the finest and most formally innovative documentaries of the past decade, such as In the Realms of the Unreal (2004) and Protagonist (2007). Her latest film Misconception, which recently had its world premiere at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, is somewhat of a step down from these in formal terms, as it is much closer to traditional documentaries than her previous work. Still, Jessica Yu brings considerable style and verve to her examination of the issue of the world population explosion, with a triptych of compelling stories that bring the vast parameters of this complex and often overwhelming issue down to a human level. Also, the film provocatively challenges received wisdom about the actual nature of the problem of...
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[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
- 5/1/2014
- Screen Anarchy
The production company that brought us An Inconvenient Truth, about global climate change, and Food, Inc., about the American food industry, now tackles the international water crisis with this thoroughly researched, cleverly presented, awfully depressing documentary by Jessica Yu. Since winning an Oscar for her documentary short Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien, Yu has carved out an eclectic career of esoteric documentaries (In the Realms of the Unreal, Protagonist) and popular television (The West Wing, Grey’s Anatomy). Here, she builds what she calls a “structured mosaic” of startling statistics and memorable personalities that leave a distressing...
- 5/2/2012
- Pastemagazine.com
2011 Toronto International Film Festival player Last Call at the Oasis helmed by Jessica Yu goes to Ato Pictures Ato Pictures has picked up U.S. distribution rights to Participant Media's documentary helmed by Jessica Yu-directed which made its premiere at this year's Tiff, reports Deadline. Last Call at the Oasis is a shocking investigation into the world's water crisis and uses the work of scientists and activists including the real Erin Brockovich. Jessica Yu helmed the 2007 documentary The Protagonist and has several TV credits to her name, including work at the helm of Grey's Anatomy...
- 9/21/2011
- Upcoming-Movies.com
2011 Toronto International Film Festival player Last Call at the Oasis helmed by Jessica Yu goes to Ato Pictures Ato Pictures has picked up U.S. distribution rights to Participant Media's documentary helmed by Jessica Yu-directed which made its premiere at this year's Tiff, reports Deadline. Last Call at the Oasis is a shocking investigation into the world's water crisis and uses the work of scientists and activists including the real Erin Brockovich. Jessica Yu helmed the 2007 documentary The Protagonist and has several TV credits to her name, including work at the helm of Grey's Anatomy...
- 9/21/2011
- Upcoming-Movies.com
TIFF11: "Last Call at the Oasis" Director Jessica Yu Talks Big Issue Docs and Avoiding Fearmongering
As I noted in my review of "Last Call at the Oasis," I'm not always for the big issue docs that try to save the world. So I was pleasantly surprised to really enjoy and appreciate how Jessica Yu worked with a grand-scale cause such as water. As in water shortage, water contamination and really any every other water-related problem affecting some part of the world today. I just had to talk to the Oscar-winning filmmaker, known previously for nontraditional docs like "In the Realms of the Unreal" and "Protagonist" and the fictional sports comedy "Ping Pong Playa," to find…...
- 9/12/2011
- Spout
Toronto - Lost of potential acquisition titles and awards season players are getting a ton of pre-festival publicity, but less celebrity-friendly documentaries are also a key component of the Toronto International Film Festival's slate. This year, Davis Guggenheim's "From The Sky Down" about U2 is getting most of the opening night buzz, but there is another doc debuting on the same day that might be much more influential, "Last Call at the Oasis." Directed by Academy Award winner Jessica Yu ("Protagonist," "The Realms of the Unreal") and produced by Elise Pearlstein ("Food, Inc."), the doc focuses on the growing concern with...
- 9/8/2011
- Hitfix
Alive Mind Cinema will be releasing El Bulli: Cooking In Progress, the definitive documentary about Ferran Adrià and the boundless culinary creativity and uncompromising methodology he orchestrates at his gastronomical mecca: El Bulli. The film will open at New York.s Film Forum on July 27th, followed by a nationwide release to select cities.
El Bulli, the three-star Michelin restaurant located outside Barcelona in the Catalan province of Girona, has received the S. Pellegrino World.s 50 Best Restaurants Award five times in the last decade, and in 2010 Ferran Adrià was named the Chef of the Decade by the same organization. Adrià is deemed a brilliant innovator, the father of molecular gastronomy, and sometimes a crazy chef. Each year for six months he and his staff sequester themselves to concentrate on creating and testing the new culinary wonders that will become their next 30-course menu. (The restaurant accommodates only 50 for dinner,...
El Bulli, the three-star Michelin restaurant located outside Barcelona in the Catalan province of Girona, has received the S. Pellegrino World.s 50 Best Restaurants Award five times in the last decade, and in 2010 Ferran Adrià was named the Chef of the Decade by the same organization. Adrià is deemed a brilliant innovator, the father of molecular gastronomy, and sometimes a crazy chef. Each year for six months he and his staff sequester themselves to concentrate on creating and testing the new culinary wonders that will become their next 30-course menu. (The restaurant accommodates only 50 for dinner,...
- 5/26/2011
- by Melissa Howland
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
I entered the world of documentaries and Hot Docs late in the game -- when I first dove into festival coverage for Cinematical back in ol' 2007 -- but oh, I fell quickly and hard. That first year, Hot Docs immediately became the prime movie hurrah, trumping my long love of the Worldwide Short Film Fest and more than holding its own against the hustle and Hollywood bustle of the Toronto International Film Festival. At first I believed that it was because I always picked great films. Very rarely did one disappoint.
But there was another aspect plucking at the strings of fan love. Having written the Girls on Film column for over a year now (Happy Anniversary as of April 20!), I realized that I was also enamored with the festival because of the strong and thriving female voice that it, and the world of documentaries, celebrates. It's not unnatural to...
But there was another aspect plucking at the strings of fan love. Having written the Girls on Film column for over a year now (Happy Anniversary as of April 20!), I realized that I was also enamored with the festival because of the strong and thriving female voice that it, and the world of documentaries, celebrates. It's not unnatural to...
- 5/4/2010
- by Monika Bartyzel
- Cinematical
Richard Lorber has formed a new distribution company Alive Mind to release documentary programming in "the areas of enlightened consciousness and cultural transformation." Alive Mind is a specialty distribution arm of his new company, Lorber HT Digital. Its newest acquisition is The Gates acquired for North America. Current releases include the documentary film the musical Hair, Hair: Let The Sun Shine In, director Jessica Yu's Protagonist, and FLicKeR about Brion Gysin, visionary artist and beat generation inventor of the "Dreamachine". Created out of the realization that many fine non-fiction works were “failing to connect not only with general audiences but also even with specialized audiences whose interests were aligned with the focus of the filmmaker” the company generally works on a revenue sharing basis with their filmmakers and aspires to make them marketing partners in an effort to reach the largest specialized audience and the most passionate segments of the general audience."...
- 1/6/2009
- Sydney's Buzz
Why do so many documentary filmmakers nurture a secret desire to make lowbrow comedies and genre pictures? Prior to co-writing and directing Ping Pong Playa, Jessica Yu had a reputation as one of the most daring documentarians around, thanks to features like the stylish, thoughtful In The Realms Of The Unreal and Protagonist, and shorts like the Academy Award-winning "Breathing Lessons." Now, in the grand tradition of Canadian Bacon and The Dark Wind, Yu has made a fiction feature that contains little to no traces of anything that made her doc work special. In fact, it's practically remedial. Which doesn't mean Ping Ping Playa is bad, necessarily—or at least not as bad as Canadian Bacon or The Dark Wind. For the most part, it's an amiable underdog sports comedy, co-written by and starring Jimmy Tsai as an L.A. slacker who's forced by circumstance to take over his mother's table-tennis.
- 9/4/2008
- by Noel Murray
- avclub.com
By Neil Pedley
This week's trip to the multiplex offers a jaunt around the globe where, amongst other things, there's a case of mistaken ethnicity in Boston, Nic Cage gets another wig fitted in Thailand, there's whimsy and surrealism in Scotland and Matthew McConaughey is right at home in Malibu, where he might finally have found something he does well, maybe.
"August Evening"
Strained emotional bonds and the transitory nature of the life of an illegal immigrant provide the backdrop for Chris Eska's quietly affecting family drama that stars Pedro Castaneda as an aging farmhand who loses his job at a chicken farm in a sleepy Texas town, forcing he and his devoted daughter-in-law (Veronica Loren) to relocate to San Antonio to stay with his older children and the grandchildren he never knew he had. As Alison Willmore pointed out in last week's Lunchbox, Castaneda is a first-time actor...
This week's trip to the multiplex offers a jaunt around the globe where, amongst other things, there's a case of mistaken ethnicity in Boston, Nic Cage gets another wig fitted in Thailand, there's whimsy and surrealism in Scotland and Matthew McConaughey is right at home in Malibu, where he might finally have found something he does well, maybe.
"August Evening"
Strained emotional bonds and the transitory nature of the life of an illegal immigrant provide the backdrop for Chris Eska's quietly affecting family drama that stars Pedro Castaneda as an aging farmhand who loses his job at a chicken farm in a sleepy Texas town, forcing he and his devoted daughter-in-law (Veronica Loren) to relocate to San Antonio to stay with his older children and the grandchildren he never knew he had. As Alison Willmore pointed out in last week's Lunchbox, Castaneda is a first-time actor...
- 9/1/2008
- by Neil Pedley
- ifc.com
New York -- IFC Films has picked up U.S. theatrical rights to Jessica Yu's Asian American-themed comedy "Ping Pong Playa."
It follows aspiring pro basketball player Christopher "C-dub" Wang (Jimmy Tsai) who is forced to settle for running his mother's ping pong class.
"Playa" is the narrative debut for documentarian Yu ("Protagonist," the Oscar-winning short "Breathing Lessons"), who co-wrote it with Tsai.
It premiered at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival, screened this weekend at New York's Asian-American Film Festival and will hit select theaters Sept. 5.
IFC's Arianna Bocco negotiated the deal with Icm and The Firm.
It follows aspiring pro basketball player Christopher "C-dub" Wang (Jimmy Tsai) who is forced to settle for running his mother's ping pong class.
"Playa" is the narrative debut for documentarian Yu ("Protagonist," the Oscar-winning short "Breathing Lessons"), who co-wrote it with Tsai.
It premiered at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival, screened this weekend at New York's Asian-American Film Festival and will hit select theaters Sept. 5.
IFC's Arianna Bocco negotiated the deal with Icm and The Firm.
- 7/20/2008
- by By Gregg Goldstein
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
- Protagonist is the latest documentary by the very talented Jessica Yu. Her short film Breathing Lessons was the winner of the 1997 Oscar and was followed by the wonderfully creative In the Realms Of The Unreal about the mysterious artist Henry Darger. She is a master of exploring the odd and extreme in the everyday world around us. Her latest film is no exception as she opens our eyes to the good intentions of a terrorist and the secret homosexuality of a televangelist.Protagonist inter-cuts pieces of ancient Greek Tragedy with the stories of four redeemed men. Each man tells an incredible story of dysfunction and obsession while the Greek text (performed by wooden puppets) creates a dramatic undercurrent for the true stories. It seems to ask the question: Can real life be as dramatic as classic tales of accidental incest and self inflicted eye-gouging? Yu came to the idea
- 11/29/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
IFC Films
Inspired by the plays of Euripedes, Jessica Yu brings a fresh and bracing slant to the psychology of personality in Protagonist, her documentary look at four lives defined by fanaticism.
Although it takes a while for Yu's thesis to jell, the film makes a lasting impression as it delves into an unfashionable territory: character as fate rather than a function of pharmaceuticals. Through the prism of its central quartet -- an "ex-gay" minister, a bank robber, a German terrorist and a martial arts devotee -- the docu lays bare the delusions and dangers of extremism, a timely subject in this age of black-and-white thinking.
A selection of the International Documentary Assn.'s DocuWeek theatrical showcase, Protagonist is slated for release Sept. 26. Its stylized aesthetic touches are best appreciated on the big screen, but the docu's intellectual sheen and unwillingness to pander will probably make it a stronger performer on DVD than as a theatrical title.
To structure the dramatic arcs of her central quartet's stories, Yu -- whose In the Realms of the Unreal dared to animate the paintings of outsider artist Henry Darger -- uses striking visual motifs. Robert Conner contributes elegant title animation sequences to announce thematic chapters that include Provocation, Turning Point, Fever and Catharsis. Supplementing the talking-head interviews, home movies, news footage and stills and serving as a true Greek chorus are puppets designed by Janie Geiser. The muslin-clad wooden creations of primitive, intricate beauty perform excerpts from Euripedes, with voice-over performance in ancient Greek. The puppets also enact some of the more crucial, often brutal scenes from the protagonists' sagas, their masked faces hauntingly expressive.
After considering hundreds of potential subjects, Yu selected four men whose stories' connective threads might at first seem elusive. But the film builds a compelling composite portrait of obsessive, all-or-nothing allegiance to a chosen pursuit, and the eventual embrace of uncertainty as a truer -- and less destructive -- approach. Outcasts during often devastating childhoods, they channeled primal rage into transgression and power over others, only to find themselves living a lie or having become precisely what they set out to oppose. That they found the strength to leave the fold -- whether revolutionary cells or an evangelical church -- is extraordinary. In Yu's nimble narrative, their disparate experiences of struggle, triumph, collapse and rebirth overlap and parallel one another in increasingly fascinating ways.
Inspired by the plays of Euripedes, Jessica Yu brings a fresh and bracing slant to the psychology of personality in Protagonist, her documentary look at four lives defined by fanaticism.
Although it takes a while for Yu's thesis to jell, the film makes a lasting impression as it delves into an unfashionable territory: character as fate rather than a function of pharmaceuticals. Through the prism of its central quartet -- an "ex-gay" minister, a bank robber, a German terrorist and a martial arts devotee -- the docu lays bare the delusions and dangers of extremism, a timely subject in this age of black-and-white thinking.
A selection of the International Documentary Assn.'s DocuWeek theatrical showcase, Protagonist is slated for release Sept. 26. Its stylized aesthetic touches are best appreciated on the big screen, but the docu's intellectual sheen and unwillingness to pander will probably make it a stronger performer on DVD than as a theatrical title.
To structure the dramatic arcs of her central quartet's stories, Yu -- whose In the Realms of the Unreal dared to animate the paintings of outsider artist Henry Darger -- uses striking visual motifs. Robert Conner contributes elegant title animation sequences to announce thematic chapters that include Provocation, Turning Point, Fever and Catharsis. Supplementing the talking-head interviews, home movies, news footage and stills and serving as a true Greek chorus are puppets designed by Janie Geiser. The muslin-clad wooden creations of primitive, intricate beauty perform excerpts from Euripedes, with voice-over performance in ancient Greek. The puppets also enact some of the more crucial, often brutal scenes from the protagonists' sagas, their masked faces hauntingly expressive.
After considering hundreds of potential subjects, Yu selected four men whose stories' connective threads might at first seem elusive. But the film builds a compelling composite portrait of obsessive, all-or-nothing allegiance to a chosen pursuit, and the eventual embrace of uncertainty as a truer -- and less destructive -- approach. Outcasts during often devastating childhoods, they channeled primal rage into transgression and power over others, only to find themselves living a lie or having become precisely what they set out to oppose. That they found the strength to leave the fold -- whether revolutionary cells or an evangelical church -- is extraordinary. In Yu's nimble narrative, their disparate experiences of struggle, triumph, collapse and rebirth overlap and parallel one another in increasingly fascinating ways.
- 8/28/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The Sundance Documentary Composers Lab has selected seven docu filmmakers to bring their four film projects to this year's program.
Melanie Judd and Susan Motamed's Ethiopian orphan chronicle Adopt Me Michael Jordan, Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss' Iraq War training camp study Full Battle Rattle, Miguel Salazar and Margarita Martinez's Colombian civil resistance chronicle Peaceful Warriors and Edet Belzberg's The Army Recruiter will be workshopped. This year's creative advisors include My Country, My Country producer Laura Poitras and Protagonist director Jessica Yu.
Melanie Judd and Susan Motamed's Ethiopian orphan chronicle Adopt Me Michael Jordan, Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss' Iraq War training camp study Full Battle Rattle, Miguel Salazar and Margarita Martinez's Colombian civil resistance chronicle Peaceful Warriors and Edet Belzberg's The Army Recruiter will be workshopped. This year's creative advisors include My Country, My Country producer Laura Poitras and Protagonist director Jessica Yu.
- 7/26/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The International Documentary Assn. is featuring 12 feature-length documentaries and five short nonfiction films in its 11th annual Theatrical Documentary Showcase, DocuWeek, set for Aug. 17-23 at the ArcLight Hollywood and the Landmark West Los Angeles. Features appearing are Chops, Curt Kobain About a Son, In the Shadow of the Moon, Here and Now, "Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone," Nanking, A Promise to the Dead, The Price of Sugar, Protagonist, Taxi to the Dark Side, "War/Dance" and We Are Together. The featured shorts are Angel's Fire, Gene Boy, Steps to Eternity, Salim Baba and Sari's Mother.
- 7/13/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
- For the most part, many of the films I caught at this year's Sundance film fest will find their way at your local art house theatre. Here is the complete sampling of how I spent my time in Park City.Top 5:Son of Rambow was Park City’s biggest buy and if marketed well enough - this could delight the mass audiences thanks to its generous dose of good natured humor and its sincere Pov of what it is to be a boy! Garth Jennings beautifully displays the imaginative world of youth, the meaningful attributes of a true friendship with a template that brings viewers back to the decade of the VHS tape and camcorder. In the vein of Danny Boyle’s Millions, I hope that us older kids give it the chance that it deserves. Despite this being his most accessible work, as I write this entry, I
- 1/31/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
- I had a really great time at Sundance, and have to say that for the most part, every film I saw was a pretty solid effort from the filmmakers. There were a few that really impressed me, and a few that didn’t. Here’s an overview of how I spent my time in Park City:Top 5: Black Snake Moan director Craig Brewer’s follow up to his breakthrough Hustle and Flow is another tale set in the south that centers on the transformative power of music. Here we have the blues instead of rap music, and the change sought is spiritual rather than socio-economic. Christina Ricci stars as a small-town Tennessee sex addict left for dead, Samuel L. Jackson the broken down blues guitarist who saves her life, then aims to save her soul. It’s nice to hear Jackson quoting scripture again. Offscreen: From award-winning Danish filmmaker Christoffer Boe,
- 1/31/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
- Protagonist didn’t pick up any prizes at the fest, but it remains one of my favorite docs viewed during the more than 25 films I saw at Sundance. Apparently the folks at IFC Films and Netflix's Red Envelope Entertainment label are moments away from closing a deal on the pic from filmmaker Jessica Yu. From the director of In the Realms Of The Unreal - this is a Greek tragedy-inspired doc that uses the stories of four diverse men to explore the organic relationship between human life and Euripidean dramatic structure....
- 1/29/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
- What do an ‘ex-gay’ evangelist, a martial arts student, a former German terrorist, and a one-time career bank robber all have in common? This is the question filmmaker Jessica Yu both poses and answers in her new feature length documentary Protagonist, competing in the Independent Film Documentary competition at Sundance. The film is a combination of the typical talking-head style interviews and archival material, but in an extremely original (and strangely, engagingly cinematic) twist, Yu stages all the reenactments with wooden rod puppets in the style of Ancient Greek tragedy stage performances. The puppets faces and heads are modeled after large wooden masks actors would wear on stage. Yu has stated she deliberately chose rod puppets (puppets operated from rods below the stage) and not marionettes because of their superior level of control and also “to avoid the symbolic implications projected by puppets controlled by strings from above.
- 1/23/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
- Quick Links Complete Film Listing: Premieres Dramatic Comp World Dramatic Comp World Doc Comp Spectrum: Park City at Midnight: New Frontier Short Film Programs January 18 to 28, 2007 Counting Down: updateCountdownClock('January 18, 2007'); Another eclectic docu section this year ranging in subject matters such as U.S Foreign policies, internal American struggles, global issues and human portraits of the young, old and stupid. On the war front we have Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, where Rory Kennedy looks at the abuses at the Iraqi prison, No End in Sight by Charles Ferguson looks at the chain of decisions that led to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and in hindsight. White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki directed by Steven Okazaki looks at the human cost of atomic warfare.On the global scale, Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold’s Everything's Cool looks at alternative energy
- 1/18/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
- Here is the complete listing for this year's Sundance film festival which kicks off tomorrow!January 18 to 28, 2007 Counting Down: updateCountdownClock('January 18, 2007'); Premiere's section lineup:An American Crime - Tommy O'Haver Away From Her - Sarah Polley Black Snake Moan - Craig BrewerChapter 27 - Jarrett Schaefer Chicago 10 - Brett Morgen Clubland - Cherie Nowlan The Good Night - Jake Paltrow King of California - Mike Cahill Life Support - Nelson George Longford - Tom Hooper The Nines - John August Resurrecting the Champ - Rod Lurie The Savages - Tamara Jenkins Son of Rambow - Garth Jennings Summer Rain - Antonio Banderas Trade - Marco Kreuzpaintner Year of the Dog - Mike White Dramatic Competition:Adrift in Manhattan - Alfredo de Villa Broken English - Zoe CassavetesFour Sheets to the Wind - Sterlin HarjoThe Good Life - Steve BerraGrace Is Gone - James C. StrouseHounddog - Deborah Kampmeier Joshua
- 1/17/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
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