The Real Alaska - New Book You Probably Won't See In Your Local Bookstore

Image from email from Thanachart

Unless you live in Thailand.  But maybe we can convince a few Anchorage stores to stock it.


Thanachart (Benz)    Siripatrachai first came to Alaska last December (2013) along with his award winning short documentary The Words I Love.  He's a Thai who was finishing film school
in New York City and he stayed with us a few of the days he was in Anchorage.  Here's my post including a video where he declares his love of Alaska.

Then in April 2014 he sent me a copy of his book New York First Time and a link to a video he'd made to promote the book.  It had, at the time over two million hits!  The book went to the top of the Thai best seller list.

Later he sent me another email saying he was coming back to Alaska because his publisher wanted him to do a book on Alaska, because, he said, there aren't many in Thai.  So he was back in Alaska this summer and we got to see him again for a couple of the days he was here. 

So, now the Alaska book is out.  If it's anything like the New York book, it will have lots of photos, chapter titles and headings in English, and the main text will be in Thai.  It will be humorous and the language will be a little spicy.

He said he'll send me a copy when he gets back to New York from Thailand where he's promoting the book at the National Book Fair in Bangkok.

Image from email from Thanachart

I'm going to try to convince him that some of the books should be on sale in Alaska.  I'm sure some people would buy it, even if they can't read it all.  And there's a sizable Thai-Lao community here who can read it.

This page shows the monk at the Thai Buddhist temple on D St just north of Fireweed.  They have lots of Thai readers and I'm sure this is one of the first books to cover their temple.  The money tree in the picture is covered with donations from many different countries.  (Benz didn't get to the temple last December, but I made sure he got there on his summer trip.)

Below is a picture Benz sent me of him signing his books at the Thai Book Fair.  He's sitting in the center in the dark blue shirt.

Image from email from Thanachart

His video for the New York 1st Time book made him something of a celebrity in Thailand, so I suspect this book on Alaska will get a lot more attention than such a book normally would.  I'm pretty sure the title is tongue-in-cheek, but we may see an uptick in Thai visitors to Alaska.

And none of this would have happened without the Anchorage International Film Festival (which will be Dec. 5-14 this year) which got Benz to Alaska for the first time. 

AIFF 2014: Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Hungary, Poland - Some Countries Getting Features Into Anchorage International Film Festival 2014

The Anchorage International Film Festival is just around the corner - Dec. 5 - 14.  The films selected for the festival recently were announced, and if I weren't ping-ponging between Anchorage and LA to look in on my mom, I would have had this up earlier.  But here's a quick look at the features selected.  Those checked as being "In Competition" were selected by the judges to be in the running for a Golden Oosik Award.

You can check out the AAIF website to get more details of these films and information about the films in the other categories.


Feature, at AIFF, means 'fiction films over 55 minutes.'

Features
Title	Director(s)	Country	Runtime	In Competition
6 Bullets To Hell	Tanner Beard	Spain, USA	80m	✓
The Ambassador to Bern	Attila Szász	Hungary	77m	✓
Appropriate Behavior	Desiree Akhavan	USA	90m	✓
Come to My Voice [Were Denge Min]	Huseyin Karabey	France, Germany, Turkey	90m	✓
I Believe In Unicorns	Leah Meyerhoff	USA	80m	✓
Kurmanjan Datka [Queen of the Mountains]	Sadyk Sher-Niyaz	Kyrgyzstan	136m	✓
Listening	Khalil Sullins	USA	98m
The Lookalike	Richard Gray	USA	100m
Mr. Intangibles	Ben Bolea	USA	82m
Porch Stories	Sarah Goodman	Canada	73m
Rocks In My Pockets	Signe Baumane	USA, Latvia	88m	✓
Sacrifice	Michael Cohn	USA	105m
The Secret Sharer	Peter Fudakowski	United Kingdom, Poland	103m
Teacher of the Year	Jason Strouse	USA	82m
These Hopeless Savages	Sean Lewis	USA	87m

The Alaska (in name only) Film Awards Shrinking List Of Winners

The 2014 'winners' are now listed for this 'Awards' scheme.  I've written about this ripoff of the name Alaska film event at length and been threatened by their attorney.

Their only link to Alaska was a "suite" at a commercial mail forwarding company in Anchorage, some of the photos on their website (and I'm not sure of their Alaska authenticity), and the names of some of their awards.

There is no festival (they did change their name to 'awards') and no showing of films.  They do tell film makers there is no festival, but the Alaska name is highly misleading and confuses people who think they are sending films to the legitimate Anchorage International Film Festival.  (To be completely transparent, I'll mention that I cover the AIFF on the blog here, the festival links to my blog, and they give me a pass to the festival.)

Below is a list of the Film Awards winners.  Note:  there is a total of eleven winners in the film competition and four in the screenplay competition.  This is a sharp decline from their 47 film awards and 15 screenplay awards in 2010.

I'd like to think this reflects more awareness among filmmakers that this is really a vanity film festival where people can pay for awards.  But it's hard to tell, since there is no list of films that were submitted.  We don't know if every film submitted got an award or not.

 

Film Competition

Grand Jury Award: A Frenchman in Barrow directed by Paul Peterson
Special Jury Award: Parallel Maze directed by Ya Hua
Kodiak Award: Slushamed directed by Marisa McInnes-Taylor and Mara De La Rosa
Denali Award: Reestablishment directed by Shi Qin
Best Narrative Feature: Let's Play Ghost directed by Damien Dematra
Best Documentary Feature: God Has Arrived directed by John Urich-Sass
Best Director: Deep Water directed by Daniel Zagaevsky
Best Narrative Short: Roulette directed by Christine Kelly
Best Student Film: Shtax'heen Kwaan: A Rededication directed by Kristin Galla
Best Music Video: Fade Away directed by Jethro Rothe-Kushel
Best of Alaska Award: The Meaning of Wild directed by Ben Hamilton

Screenplay Competition

1st Place Screenplay - "Grace" written by Lynda Lemberg and Jeffrey Allen Russel
2nd Place Screenplay - "Taco Day in Heaven" written by Paul Peterson
3rd Place Screenplay - "Polar Bear" written by Alexander Norton
4th Place Screenplay - "Zoo" written by Annemarie Lawless

I've contacted some of the winners listed here and they've confirmed that, again, this year, in order to get their prizes they have to pay for them - not a practice of legitimate film festivals.  One of the directors listed said he didn't even know his film had been submitted, let alone that it won, though he allowed that someone else involved may have submitted it.

My hope is, as I mentioned above, that the declining number of winners means film makers are more aware of scam film events and aren't submitting to them.  If you look at the film that won the Grand Jury prize, you'll see that the quality of films isn't great.  (It's apparently a student film from Barrow and as such is fine, but it's hardly a Grand Jury prize winner.  And one might ask the Alaska International Film Awards folks who exactly makes us their Grand Jury?  And even if there is a Grand Jury?  Or is that just some fancy name with no actual Grand Jury?

Some of the other winners do seem to be serious films that have won prizes at legitimate festivals and would have been accepted in the serious Anchorage International Film Festival.  A number of these films have Alaskan themes and were purposely submitted to what they thought was an Alaska based film festival.  Deep Water was filmed in Alaska as were a couple of others.    These are films that would have been submitted to the Anchorage International Film Festival where people in Anchorage would actually have been able to see them.

I should note that there are also some other, smaller, legitimate Alaska film festivals such as the Indigenous World Film Festival.

Some Not So Random Shots At Pride Fest

We didn't get there until after 3pm.  It was a gray day with some light drizzle, but that had ended by the time we got there.




We found ourselves standing next to the No on Prop 1 booth which was right next to the BP Booth.  That got me thinking about who else had booths.  Here are a few.







The Yes on 1 folks had a booth too, but by the time I got around to getting their picture it was almost 5pm and a lot of booths were already being dismantled.






US House candidate Forrest Dunbar was talking with the operations manager for the Alaska Workers Association, Barbara Sarantitis at the AWA booth.

AWA works with low-paid workers and their newsletter says

"AWA members cooperate year-round in organizing a self-help free-of charge Benefit Program that includes emergency food, cloting, preventive medical care, legal advice, non-emergency dental care . . ."

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America was there letting people know that LGBT folks were welcome at their church.  I didn't see Jim Minnery and his Love Your Gay Neighbor campaign.

Darrel Hess was staffing the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission and Ombudsman table.

The Anchorage International Film Festival had a booth to promoting the GayLa part of the festival.  Three AIFF heavy weights were at the booth when I got there:  Laura Moscatello, the general manager,  and board members Rich Curtner, and Dean Franklin,  who is also their web manager. 

The National Park Service was there as well.