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Table of Contents
SOMEPLACE ELSE Screenings
Kai-Duc Luong JASON SOEDA: Aloha, Kai-Duc! How excited are you to see SOMEPLACE ELSE open in Hawaii? KAI-DUC LUONG: Truly excited!!! For a young filmmaker like myself, being showcased at LVHIFF, one of the top film festivals in the international circuit, is just great! This is one of the things my crew wished for when making and finishing the film, so we are all very happy! Plus, Hawaii has a special resonance for me as an Asian-born immigrant who lived in the U.S. and France. Hawaii is a place that embodies the rich heritage of a cross/multi-cultural background between Asia and the western parts of the world. So I am eager to get the audience's reaction to SOMEPLACE ELSE, which deals a lot with questions of identity as a person with a multicultural heritage. JS: Your film has been described as "part musical documentary, part personal meditation." How would you describe your film? KDL: There isn't a simple way to describe it and it's hard for people to really know what to expect until they've seen it. It's at times introspective, at times real funny or touching, and always engaging and rhythmic as the film goes from the songs the bluesman Vance interprets to the more personal parts of my story. In short, it's the true story of an older bluesman who inspires a younger artist to let go of his fears and become the person he's been longing to become, by creating this feature film. The film has a language and form of its own - at the boundaries between a documentary-portrait, with music video-art pieces, and a personal film journal employing the narrative thread of fiction. It was a way for us to be original and expand the documentary form - not because we weren't avid fans of more traditional documentary pieces, but because this was how I knew best to portray the musician, his artistry, lifestyle and joie-de-vivre, while weaving in my own audiovisual perspectives, and sharing it with the audience. JS: SOMEPLACE ELSE gets extremely personal in your life. Did you ever feel uncomfortable sharing so much of yourself? KDL: It may sound cliché but there is a real therapeutic or cathartic quality to saying out loud what you keep for yourself. Often times, strangers would come to me after the film, and say that they can relate to what I've experienced in the film and it makes me feel that I'm not alone being this way. Like why people move away from one city to go to another at times crossing continents? The usual answer is "for professional/educational opportunities;" often times it's more personal because you've just gotten out of a relationship or a life-changing event. Or what keeps us afloat when many things in life seem to go wrong? A personal project I was passionate for (making this feature film) kept me afloat in my case. Plus the video/film medium is a great one to not only express in words what you'd like to share with the audience but also with moving images and sounds, and the closer I was able to express what I wanted to express, the better it felt. So I didn't feel too uncomfortable sharing many personal things. On the contrary, it was like having many people to confide to and bond with. JS: I read on your MySpace page that SOMEPLACE ELSE took three years to complete. What kind of challenges did you encounter along the way? KDL: We didn't really have much experience making a feature film when we started the project, nor did we have the budget or material resource for it. Some crewmembers joined because it was a cool experience to be part of, others wanted to have fun mingling within the blues community, and others wanted to perfect their skills in filmmaking - all of us being movie buffs, of course. So the challenge only became very apparent in post after we had filmed the 125+ hours of the band's footage by end of 2005. How do we sort this considerable amount of data out (some of it good, some of it bad due to the limited light and low-budget video equipment we had when shooting the film)? And how do we make it a film that people will want to watch while staying true to the characters at portrayal without fabricating reality since it was a documentary? The screenplay really started to come to life as we moved along with reviewing the footage, ingesting it, and sorting it. We had also lots of backstage footage as well, and wanted to incorporate all the film's crewmembers in the film at first with each and everyone's personal take on their current life and where they'd see themselves on our common journey to "someplace else." But because of our daytime jobs, limited resources and personal life events, we just didn't really have the possibility to be as extensive and decided to stick to the portrayal of Vance while trying to include my personal journal as well. Along the way, my co-director Avisheh lost her father, so it was a very difficult time for her. And I had to bear most of the responsibility finishing post for the film. But as things seemed to move along quite well towards the end of 2006 with some 40 minutes of edit completed, I had a real technical problem that caused a lot of grief as two of my Hard-drives crashed and the data was all gone (I know, I should have had a better backup system...). With the cost of production being very restrained and the fact that it would cost us thousands more dollars to recuperate the data with no guarantee to have the metadata restored, I decided to restart from scratch the whole edit of the film in mid-2007, editing most every night after work. By early 2008, I was already jobless, and my brother came to Chicago to help me for a month and get a rough cut of the film. We were literally locked in my office editing for a solid month, with little sleep and lots of heated debates on how to come up with a good rough edit, reworking the screenplay, and fine-tuning the sequences. After the rough edit, I would show the film to friends and I'd rework the things that didn't work out for another couple of months, around the clock. But it all turned out really well in the end, and it was such a relief to have a locked version I was happy to show. JS: You were born in Cambodia of Chinese descent and lived in France before moving to the U.S. As a filmmaker from such a rich multicultural background, do you feel an obligation to tell stories that relate to your own life experiences? KDL: Perhaps not obliged but definitely compelled to do so. My grandparents and parents stories are so rich that I feel mine is very tame compared to theirs. They've migrated from China to Vietnam during World War II, then moved from Vietnam to Cambodia during the Vietnam war, then fled Cambodia to go to France during the Pol Pot regime. I feel that sharing each and everyone of our story and daily experiences can only enrich us all - as living beings on this planet - as well as help break barriers and prejudices. Above all, the film is homage to the everyman/woman in our everyday kind of life, just like the music we were trying to showcase through the portrayal of Vance Kelly and his band. JS: What do you want audiences to take away from your film? KDL: Be proud of being who you are. Follow your passions in life. Don't wait till it's too late. Obviously it's easier said than done ... but it might sometimes be easier than we think. JS: What's next for you, Kai-Duc? KL: I hope to continue making films, and videos for galleries, museums and musicians. I am working on two screenplays right now, trying to figure out which one I'm going to give more weight on and develop fully in the next year or so as I reach out for R&D funding. If anyone is interested please do not hesitate to contact me. One involves the story of my grandparents and parents, from my mother's and my perspective. It might take on the form of a documentary first as I have shot about 10 hours of a trip we made with my mother in 2005 to go back for the first time to Cambodia and Vietnam, some 30 years after we left the countries during the Pol Pot regime, to arrive in France. Unfortunately my mother just recently passed away, so what I have left only is those footages and notes she'd written. With that information, I will try and reconstitute her journey with the end goal of creating a fiction out of her scripture. The other screenplay is a love story inspired by personal events because I am a fan of love stories. Also creating a few personal video pieces for my own sake and a couple indie bands, since I like to make music videos. I finally wouldn't mind just directing a feature project as opposed to wearing so many hats like what I did for SOMEPLACE ELSE given its resource and financial limitations.
Just For Fun: HIFF Survey
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