(June 12, 2007) 2007 LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL’S “FAST TRACK” CHOSEN
LOS ANGELES (June 12, 2007) — The 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival has announced the participants selected for the 5th annual Fast Track program, co-presented by Filmmaker magazine and sponsored by Eastman Kodak Company.

“We are proud to provide ongoing resources and exposure to LA Film Festival alumni as well as Film Independent fellows, and help move their promising, innovative projects forward,” said Film Independent Executive Director, Dawn Hudson. “It is especially exciting that two previous Fast Track projects, Scott Prendergast’s ‘Kabluey’ (2005) and Billy Luther’s “Miss Navajo” (2006), have been selected to screen in this year’s Festival.”

Upon acceptance, Fast Track participants receive a pass to the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival and participate in Kodak Speed Dating, during which filmmakers meet with key executives, agents, managers, buyers, financiers, and industry executives who can provide tangible means to help get their next film made. The program and its projects will be highlighted in the Summer 2007 issue of Filmmaker magazine.

Previous Fast Track projects include Jennifer Westfeldt’s Ira and Abby, Jessica Sanders’ award-winning documentary After Innocence, and Sterlin Harjo’s Four Sheets to the Wind, which premiered at Sundance this year. Scott Prendergast’s feature Kabluey, which will premiere at the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival, was in Fast Track in 2005.

The 2007 Fast Track participants and their projects are:

1. A Letter to Elise
At 28, Robbie is about to become the most famous actor in Hollywood – that is, as soon as he moves out of his parents’ house.

Mike Ott, Writer/Director
Mike Ott grew up on the outskirts of Los Angeles where he began making narrative films on Super 8 after graduating high school. He went on to earn his MFA in Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts. While at Cal Arts, Ott made numerous short films and music videos for bands including Pretty Girls Make Graves and the Blood Brothers. His debut feature, Analog Days, premiered at the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival. In addition to being a filmmaker, Ott runs his own record label, Sound Virus Records, releasing CDs and vinyl for undiscovered and emerging bands.

Jennifer Shahin, Writer/Producer
Jennifer Shahin grew up in Canyon Country, California. After studying theatre for nine years, she moved into film and television. She co-produced and co-directed two network pilots, followed by three music videos for MTV, MTV2, and FUSE, as well as several short narrative films. Most recently she produced Mike Ott’s feature Analog Days.

2 A Lifetime In Heat
Fifteen hours in the lives of three teenage boys from suburban Detroit on the night one of them enlists in the Marines to fight in Iraq.

Gina Kwon, Producer
An independent producer based in Los Angeles, Gina Kwon recently produced Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know for IFC Films and FilmFour. Kwon, co-producer of The Good Girl, associate producer of Chuck & Buck, has worked closely with director Miguel Arteta and producer Matthew Greenfield; recently they produced writer/director Michael Kang’s The Motel, which was released by Palm Pictures in 2006. Kwon is a winner of Film Independent’s 2005 Bravo/American Express Producers Award, an award given out at the Spirit Awards that honours emerging producers. She is also a recipient of the 2004 Mark Silverman/Sundance Fellowship for New Producers.

A Lifetime in Heat was co-written, and will be directed by, Joe Forte, who wrote Firewall, starring Harrison Ford.

3. Elysian Fields
‘Countess’ Willie Piazza takes on the political establishment of New Orleans to save the only home she’s ever known – her brothel. Set during the birth of jazz, she enlists the help of two men – one the father of jazz, the other a lawyer and amateur in the new art of moving pictures, who counsels her to play America’s first race card.

Susan West, Producer
Susan West has produced television and documentary films in collaboration with some of today's most interesting filmmakers, including Eleanor Coppola and Academy Award winner Jessica Yu. Most recently she produced Yu’s latest film, Protagonist, which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and will be released theatrically later this year. Previously she produced Yu’s documentary, In the Realms of the Unreal, which debuted at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. West also produced episodes for the HBO series Addiction, and VH-1's hit television program Behind the Music. West served as associate producer for the HBO show Taxicab Confessions for two seasons and was director of On Air Talent for E! Entertainment Television, as well as having produced programs for A&E and Bravo.

Prior to her work in film and television, West produced theatre in New York City, producing some of the most innovative live performance acts in the United States and Europe, including the Blue Man Group, Bill Irwin, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, and Robert Wilson

Elysian Fields was written by Jeffrey LaHoste (The Laramie Project).

4. Exactly Like You
Based on a true story, Exactly Like You chronicles the groundbreaking life of Billie Tipton, an innovative musician who risked it all to hide one secret from his family and his fans – Billy was born Dorothy.

Silas Howard, Writer/Director
Writer, director, and musician Silas Howard co-directed her first feature, By Hook or By Crook, with Harry Dodge. The indie classic premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically by Artistic License. Her short documentary, What I Love About Dying, premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
For eight years, Howard toured nationally and internationally with her band Tribe 8. The notorious punk band released four full-length recordings on Alternative Tentacles and was featured in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Interview, Billboard, Elle and The Los Angeles Times. Currently Howard is writing an adaptation of a novel for East of Doheny that Allison Anders is attached to direct.

Exactly Like You is being produced by Effie T. Brown (Rocket Science).

5. Jua Kali (Harsh Sun)
Grace, a headstrong, sixteen-year old Kenyan girl loses both parents to AIDS and is forced to leave school. Refusing to let this destroy her dream to finish her education, she learns to rediscover life with other AIDS orphans in the throwaway corners of society, where refuse becomes another word for redemption.

Amie Williams, Writer/Director
Amie Williams is an accomplished documentary filmmaker preparing to direct her first narrative fiction film, Jua Kali. Her past films include No Sweat, (2006) about bad-boy clothing manufacturer American Apparel, which premiered at the 2006 AFI Film Festival; Fallon, NV: Dearly Oasis (2004) about a childhood leukemia cluster, an ITVS funded film broadcast on PBS; Stripped and Teased: Tales from Las Vegas Women (2001); One Day Longer: The Story of the Frontier Strike (2002); and Uncommon Ground: From Los Angeles to South Africa (1994). Her films have won numerous awards, including the International Documentary Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Media Grant, the SONY/Streisand Award for emerging female filmmakers, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Peace Grant. Prior to her film career, Williams lived and worked in Kenya as a teacher and health-communications consultant for non-profit organizations, and continues to sponsor a street theatre group of homeless AIDS orphans in Nairobi.

Jua Kali (Harsh Sun) is being produced by Tracey Bing, formerly of Warner Independent Pictures, and Trish Dolman, of Screen Siren Pictures. Jim Denault (Maria Full of Grace, Boys Don’t Cry) is attached as cinematographer.

6. Natural Selection
Linda White lives an idyllic life as a dutiful, albeit barren, Christian housewife. That is until the day she discovers that her husband has long been secretly donating his seed to a local sperm bank, driving Linda to search for the mulleted, foul-mouthed child she never had.

Robbie Pickering, Writer/Director
Robbie Pickering was one of four students to graduate with thesis honors from USC’s Graduate Screenwriting Program in 2006. His most recent feature screenplay, Natural Selection, was selected to take part in Film Independent’s 2006 Screenwriter’s Lab. Pickering graduated from the undergraduate Film Production Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2003, where he was awarded a Lew Wasserman Screenwriting Award and a Warner Brothers Production Grant for his short film Prom Night. Prom Night, a raucous comedy about an awkward boy’s chaotic senior prom, subsequently screened at film festivals around the world and became Pickering’s second short film to win the Student Film Award at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

Charlie Mason and Justin Moore-Lewy, whose company Perfect Weekend recently produced Ferris Wheel, starring Charlize Theron, are producing Natural Selection. Nancy Foy (James Dean) is the Casting Director, and Mark Mathis (Brick) will line produce.

7. The Obit Writer
A New York City crime reporter is kicked off his regular beat and placed in obituaries where he investigates the murder of one of his subjects.

Bill Oliver, Writer/Director

Writer/director Bill Oliver earned his MFA in Directing at the AFI. He has written and directed numerous short films, including Guilt, which was based on a short story that appeared on This American Life. Oliver was in Film Independent’s Screenwriters Lab with co-writer peter Nickowitz, and their script Lulu, based on the life of silent film star Louise Brooks.

Susan A. Stover, Producer

Producer Susan Stover is a veteran independent producer whose credits include: High Art (Sundance, Cannes), Happy Accidents (Sundance), The Business of Strangers (Sundance, starring Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles), Laurel Canyon (Cannes, starring Frances McDormand and Christian Bale), and One Last Thing… (Toronto 2005). She won the Producers Award given out at the Spirit Awards in 1999.

8. Point of Reference
In the pursuit of the American dream in this globalized world, how will the accuracy of the Global Positioning System and the precision of the Atomic Clock help an older immigrant with a marginal sense of direction and a fuzzy memory of life find his reference points in space and time?

Minh Nguyen-Vo, Writer/Director
Minh Nguyen-Vo grew up in a small town in Vietnam during the war and spent a great deal of time in the only movie theatre in town to escape from the atrocities around him. Before going into filmmaking, Nguyen-Vo was a physicist trained in France and the U.S. His first feature, Buffalo Boy, was developed in Film Independent’s Screenwriters lab, and went on to win 11 international awards at Locarno, Amiens, Chicago, Cape Town, Hanoi, and the FIPRESCI Award for best Film out of fifty foreign language submissions to the 2006 Academy Awards.

Developed in Film Independent’s Directors Lab, Point of Reference is being produced by DViant Films, a Los Angeles based Production Company currently producing a series of feature films shot in America by directors from around the world, including Hany Abu-Assad, Barbara Albert, Fruit Chan, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

9. Suck
A shy girl’s obsession with a reckless musician draws her inexorably into the nascent punk scene of San Francisco in 1977, and launches her on an unlikely journey to win back the daughter she lost long ago.

Jon Reiss, Director
Jon Reiss is an acclaimed director of documentaries, narrative fiction film, and music videos. His most recent film, Bomb It, a feature-length documentary about the worldwide explosion of graffiti, had its world premiere at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. Prior to Bomb It, Reiss directed two critically acclaimed feature films. Better Living Through Circuitry is a startling, humorous and entertaining glimpse into the exploding rave culture, featuring such acts as the Crystal Method, Roni Size, and Moby, among others. Cleopatra's Second Husband is a dark psychological drama that screened at the Los Angeles, Seattle, Montreal World, Hamptons, Houston, Sao Paulo and Bangkok Film Festivals. Reiss also directed a number of groundbreaking music videos, including Happiness in Slavery for Nine Inch Nails, which won awards at the Chicago and San Francisco film festivals and was voted Top Ten by the Village Voice Critics Poll for Best Music Video. In 1995 the Toronto Film Festival curated a retrospective of his music videos.

Ursula Holloman, Writer
Ursula Holloman earned her MFA in screenwriting from the AFI, where she was awarded grants from the Women in Film and George H. Mayr Foundations. Her Six Feet Under spec script John Doe was a finalist in the Acclaim Spring 2002 Television Spec Scriptacular. She participated in Film Independent’s Screenwriters Lab in 2005. Prior to that she played guitar and sang in Sordid Details, a group that committed nothing to vinyl, which is probably for the best, so that it can live on in legend. She was also a member of the Moving & Storage dance company in Santa Cruz, California, and Breakfast of Amazons, a guerrilla theatre troupe.

10. Super Macho
A geeky Chicano musician awakens an inner machismo he never knew existed when he takes a job arresting shoplifters.

Jasmine Jaisinghani, Producer
Jasmine Jaisinghani enters film production with an extensive background in theatre and music. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University, Jaisinghani worked for Capitol Records in Promotion. She then moved to George Harrison’s label Dark Horse Records, where she was responsible for the management and release of materials from the label’s music and film archive, including the documentary Concert for George, Harrison's Grammy winning album Brainwashed and the Travelling Wilburys re-issue.
In 2005, Jaisinghani partnered with director/writer Pascal Leister (La Torcedura with Wilmer Valderramma) at Lodestar Films to develop feature films and music projects. Her projects include The Good, The Bad and The Avon Lady in conjunction with Oscar-nominated Wim Wenders Productions. Jaisinghani also serves as a producer on legendary actor Harry Dean Stanton's album. Jaisinghani is currently developing projects with directors Nisha Ganatra (Popcorn Chutney) and Bharatbala (Hari Om and Taj Mahal- The Heart of India, India’s first IMAX film starring Aishwarya Rai) as well with recording artists Gingger Shankar (The Passion of Christ) and Cheb i Sabbah (Six Degrees Records).

Aldo Velasco, Writer/Director
Aldo Velasco is a filmmaker and playwright born in Guadalajara, Mexico. He received his MFA in Film Production from UCLA. He has directed numerous short films, the most recent of which, Hinge, premiered at the 2007 South By Southwest Film Festival. His short film Crabgrass Manifesto played the Los Angeles and Sundance Film Festivals, and won UCLA’s Spotlight Award. Velasco has also worked as a private investigator in Los Angeles. His investigation of the Mario Rocha case was featured in Mario’s Story, which won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival. Velasco is a 2005 Project: Involve Fellow.


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