Starring East Austin
By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER

Friday, July 5, 2002

To many Austinites, East Austin is one gigantic restaurant. To cross the railroad tracks is to enter a land of exotic delicacies and uncharted zests. Are there better reasons to head east than a batch of homemade tamales, a slopping plate of barbecue or legendary breakfast tacos? Before you answer, we want to hear from your stomach first.
A body of short documentaries by University of Texas film students doesn't argue the point. But the films also heap substantially more on the plates of perception. Wafting from many kitchens are living signs of culture, family, history, sometimes trouble.
In Duke Greenhill's "Sam's Barbecue," not only the biting aroma of mesquite coughs from the blackened barbecue pit; so does the homey perfume of unbroken family bonds, a braid of brotherhood and brisket. Jon Benner's "Nothing Like Mama's" shows how a grandmother pats family and heritage into her handmade tortillas. "Juan in a Million" by Trey Green uncovers a gastronomical verity: Few mortals can consume more than three of Juan's infamously mountainous breakfast tacos. Those who can tend to play a lot of football.
These films were made in the spring and last summer for the East Austin Documentary Project, a fledgling radio-television-film course at UT created and taught by Andrew Garrison, an RTF professor and filmmaker. The syllabus is simple: Students find a subject in an East Austin community and tell the story of the person or place on eight minutes of digital video.
It's a crash course in documentary storytelling and technical proficiency. It's also a quash course, quashing the assumptions so many Austinites hold about East Austin, which the films paint in kaleidoscopic bursts of people, culture and narrative.
As you read this, 13 students are toiling on location and in the RTF editing room, stitching together eight documentaries that illuminate segments of a community mired in misunderstanding. In its current summer session, the East Austin Project is a five-week whirlwind of guerrilla scholarship. Most of the films are still without a title. Most will still be wet with the filmmakers' sweat when they are screened free to the public Tuesday at Our Lady of Guadalupe and Café Mundi.
The students are meeting head-on the exhilaration of making movies.
"You're just kind of thrown into it," says Jessica Gardner, a senior RTF major. "It's like, here's some equipment, here's the program you'll edit on, go do stuff right now."
Like most of the students this summer, Gardner is collaborating with a classmate, in her case senior RTF major Bryan Lozano. They've chosen to profile veteran guitarist Clarence Pierce, a member of the blues outfit East Side Kings. Their venture has led them, camera cocked, to Sam's Barbecue and the halfway house where Pierce lives and occasionally picks.
"We've only got eight minutes," Lozano says, "so we're going to narrow it down to the blues music and how he feels about it."
The strictures of the class -- limited time, limited equipment, unfamiliar subject matter -- are keeping the students wired with adrenaline and anxiety. For each project, as much as five hours of video will have to be telescoped into fleeting minutes.
"It's harder than long format (filmmaking), because you have to condense everything down to the smallest bit," says Russel Baldonado, who, with classmate Wesley Stone, is shooting a portrait of Ruth Robinson, a colorful septagenarian who runs a halfway house called East Austin Jacob's Ladder. "The hardest thing is sacrificing what you've got."
Art is sacrifice -- that's one of many lessons Garrison wants his students to get. And part of that is doing things they wouldn't normally do, like going to the East Side and scratching beneath perceived notions of poverty, crime and urban blight in the heavily Latino and African American community.
"One of the coolest things about making media is that it forces you to talk to people, meet people and find out about people," says Garrison. "And when you start telling someone else's story you have this intimate relationship with them. Suddenly you're connected to the world in all these different ways. That's exciting to me, and I see that happening to the students."
Garrison came to UT in 1997 with a background in community media and activist nonfiction film. His narrative feature "The Wilgus Stories," starring Ned Beatty, was critically acclaimed when it aired on PBS in 2000. His in-progress documentary about the Houston art and housing program Project Row Houses recently received a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The East Austin Project is Garrison's baby. Beyond teaching students the nuts and bolts of making movies, "It also feels like you're doing something useful," he says. "I hate to characterize it as just service learning, but I think that's really important. I think a lot of students like to feel that what they're doing is doing some good for people, as well as advancing themselves."
The project couldn't have happened without the participation of East Austin community activists Juan Valadez and Miguel Guajardo. They and Garrison share a vision of getting young people involved in the community through education and art.
"It was a real natural marriage of ideas," says Garrison. "They were the ones who said, `Go do this, let's make it hap- pen.' "
Garrison also found allies in the RTF documentary program. The program boasts a line of quality, socially conscious films, including Laura Dunn's "Green," an environmental expose that won a Student Academy Award, and Heather Courtney's "The Workers," which won honors from the International Documentary Association.
"The East Austin Project is exactly what I hope UT will do more of," says RTF Chairman Paul Stekler. "Any program that brings us closer to the community is fulfilling our mandate of the future. The stuff we do is not ivory tower material. It's about the reality of peoples' lives. This project is a wonderful example of what a doc program should be."
Garrison is working to get all of the films and their outtakes permanently archived for public use. He says the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation has volunteered to house the archives.
"These images are powerful and valuable in the same way family snapshots are," says Garrison.
Garrison sees how the program is wiping indifference from the students' eyes, opening them to a world across the tracks. It's granted Dorothy VanDeCarr a privileged glimpse into the dramas of a transgendered teen-ager and exposed Elizabeth Lepe to the powerful communal role of the Green and White Store on East Seventh Street. Laura Donnelly and Melissa Aellos have looked through the eyes of three children of Mexican descent to find out how many generations it takes before one is firmly assimilated.
The East Austin Project, which will be offered this fall, is showing students that a community is much more than great breakfast tacos.
Student Baldonado remembers hearing in a journalism class how mainstream media largely ignore the living worlds of Latinos and African Americans, "unless it's a festival like Juneteenth," he says.
"So while we get a lot out of the class as filmmakers, it's also good for the community. Things tend to get filtered out. This is a way to get to the stuff that's not normally out there."
cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649.
Get a look at the films
The East Austin Documentary Project -- eight short movies about East Austin made by University of Texas film students -- will screen at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Our Lady of Guadalupe, 1206 E. Ninth St. and 9:30 p.m. Tuesday at Café Mundi, 1704 E. Fifth St. Admission is free. For info, call 475-6297.
The program includes:
* "Capirotada" by Melissa Aellos and Laura Donnelly.
* "Mrs. Robinson" (working title) by Russel Baldonado and Wesley Stone.
* "Holly" by Matt Drenik, Kevin Terrill and Apolinar "P.J." Garza.
* "Clarence Pierce" (working title) by Jessica Gardner and Bryan Lozano.
* "Sanamiento Espiritual" by Phyllis Hawkins.
* "East Side Glass" (working title) by John Johnson.
* "The History of the Green and White Store" by Elizabeth Lepe.
* "Boyhood Dreams" (working title) by Dorothy VanDeCarr.

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Letter from Derek Horne, editor of the Kodak "Campus Beat" on-line magazine.

(reprinted with permission)

August 07, 2002

Dear Prof. Garrison,

Thank you for putting me in touch with your students. I was so impressed
with their smart and insightful answers that it was both a pleasure to
write the article and a challenge to maintain the brevity of the article.

I have not heard such a consistent enthusiasm and intelligence from a
group of film students in my whole year writing for the Campus Beat. (And
believe me, I've interviewed alot of students from alot of schools) You
should feel proud of making such a lasting impact on your students that
they would have an endless supply of intelligent comments and such a
healthy perspective on the world and their work.

I won't mention the name of the school that is the exact anti-thesis of
this class and perhaps UT; but just know that it's a school where every
student seems to have learned nothing of intrinsic value in their
education, they are cynical, self-important, and motivated by all the
wrong things in their career.

With that in mind, I hope that all your students succeed in this industry.

Enjoy the article! It should be posted on the website next week. Check
www.kodak.com/go/student.

If you have any photos to send, please email them to Alyson Shurtliff who
maintains the Kodak student website. Her email address is
xxxxxxxxxxx.

Just be sure to list descriptions for all the photos and tell her that
they are for the University of Texas article in the August Campus Beat.

Best wishes!

--
Derek Horne
Campus Beat Editor
www.kodak.com/go/student

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