Double Punch

Via Sfgate

North Beach Citizens made the news recently with all the help they have done getting the homeless off the streets and back into society.

Kristie Fairchild, executive director of North Beach Citizens, works with people who’ve lost their identities, both figuratively and literally.

When Deforrest Wiggins first came to Fairchild seeking help with getting off the streets, he was deep in the throes of addiction and hadn’t spoken with any family members for 23 years.

“He just felt completely anonymous,” Fairchild says.

Eventually, North Beach Citizens helped get Wiggins off the streets, restoring his long-lost sense of identity. With his newfound sense of self, he even mustered enough courage to cold-call his parents for the first time in years. Now, he communicates with them on a daily basis.

North Beach Citizens – celebrating its 10-year anniversary Sunday with a fundraising Italian dinner – has always chosen to tackle homelessness as an individualized problem.

Filmmaker and winery-owner Francis Ford Coppola founded the nonprofit in early 2000. After Coppola brainstormed with other prominent North Beach residents about ways to address homelessness, the organization became a reality, opening its Columbus Avenue headquarters in January 2001.

Calling from his Napa Valley residence, Coppola traces the original impetus behind North Beach Citizens to his strong opinions on panhandling. “Panhandling,” Coppola argues, “is an unacceptable act for both parties.”

Coppola nonetheless felt compassion for beggars he walked past every day on his way to work. He felt an obligation to help them better their station in the community. “The first thought that I had that changed the way I was thinking was, ‘How would you deal with the citizens of North Beach who happen right now to be homeless?’ ”

Mental transformation

In this simple mental transformation – starting to think of homeless people not as pests, but as fellow citizens – the basic ideology behind North Beach Citizens was born.

Wiggins has been housed in North Beach for five years. Sitting in Fairchild’s colorful office, one spindly leg crossed over the other, Wiggins tells the story of his road to homelessness, as well as how North Beach Citizens helped him get off the streets.

Wiggins, a musician who moved to San Francisco in 1985, was dealt a crippling blow when his musical equipment was stolen from his Sixth Street apartment in 2002. “That led to depression, and then depression led to me just being irresponsible, and then I was on the street,” he says wearily.

A cocaine addiction rapidly worsened as he became homeless. “I would buy powdered coke and I would cook it,” Wiggins says. “There were years when I was into snorting it, there were years when I was into shooting it.”

Despite his destitution, Wiggins made a point of not slipping into the isolation and lawlessness he observed other homeless people succumbing to all around him. He hosted open mike nights at Melt Cafe and maintained a good rapport with Chinatown business owners.

Seeing that he was serious about breaking free from his homelessness, North Beach Citizens took Wiggins on as a client. He recalls being housed “almost immediately” five years ago. A psychiatrist the organization had connected Wiggins with determined that he was suffering from severe depression. These days, when Wiggins isn’t giving guitar lessons to locals, he volunteers for the organization that gave him a leg up, appearing at fundraisers and mentoring newer clients.

Commitments

Along with some of North Beach Citizens’ other veteran clients, Wiggins polices the newer clients to make sure they’re keeping up their end of the commitment to reintegrate into mainstream society. “Just because you’re homeless, we’re not going to enable you to get drunk and act like a fool in the neighborhood,” Wiggins says sternly.

In the organization’s early days, many North Beach residents and business owners worried that North Beach Citizens would draw more homeless people to the neighborhood without being able to manage them properly. Though sympathetic to their aims from the get-go, long-time North Beach resident Robert Hinish recalls the organization’s early days as “sort of like the lunatics running the asylum.”

“It was a very well-intended effort on the part of Francis Ford Coppola,” Hinish concedes. “But the folks they hired to supervise it just didn’t provide any structure.” Citing drug use, loitering and fighting as common sights in the vicinity of North Beach Citizens, Hinish says, “It became a very messy situation.”
Fairchild lauded

Hinish says that once Kristie Fairchild took the helm of North Beach Citizens, the more unseemly aspects of having a homelessness nonprofit in the neighborhood vanished and its benefits for the community emerged.

“This organization has turned itself around in ways that few organizations have” Hinish says. “It’s become a very positive influence on the homeless people it serves, and they’ve taken the measures they needed to take to make sure that the homeless problems we have are not a result of North Beach Citizens any longer.”

Over its 10 year history, North Beach Citizens has found permanent homes for 147 people. The city of San Francisco spends $61,000 in public services on each homeless individual using city services per year, Fairchild says. Comparatively, it costs just $18,000 for a formerly homeless person to live in independent housing. Wiggins says what makes North Beach Citizens successful is its recognition of one crucial fact: “Everybody’s got different problems.”

Dinner on the Piazza benefit, 6 p.m. Sun. Saints Peter and Pual Church, 666 Filbert St. Tickets start at $150. (415) 772-0982. www.northbeachcitizens.org/spring.

E-mail David Wagner at dwagner@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page F – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/28/DDDF1J96FP.DTL#ixzz1LS0E4YSw

Via LA Times

North Beach has been attracting a lot of new filmmakers. Friend of the shop, Daron Ker, has a few new films coming out. Rice Fields of Dreams and I Ride. You can check out his website at www.waterbuffalopics.com. His new film, I Ride, is having a premiere in the next couple weeks featuring over 400 bikers. Good times indeed.

His ‘Rice Field of Dreams’ has helped touch off a new engagement with the country that his family once fled, including hopes for a film school.

By Kevin Baxter, Los Angeles Times

April 10, 2011

Filmmaker Daron Ker’s earliest childhood remembrances come from the three torturous years he spent in a malaria-ridden concentration camp in the center of Cambodia’s killing fields.

His next, more pleasant memories are of watching movies projected on a tattered bedsheet in a refugee camp just across the Thai border.

“The one film that I really loved was ‘Spartacus,'” Ker says enthusiastically. “It’s weird, because I didn’t understand anything. But it was the most powerful thing I had ever seen.”

So powerful it fueled a circuitous journey to the United States, through film school and, after a nearly 30-year absence, back to his estranged homeland to direct his first full-length documentary, “Rice Field of Dreams,” which has its world premiere locally this week.

It was a return both uplifting and depressing — and ultimately life-changing.

“I was just so devastated, you know what I mean?” he asks. “I had forgotten. There was a moment for me thinking, ‘Where would I have been?'”

“It’s hopeless,” he added, referring to his initial feeling about the situation in his homeland. “In that aspect, I was, like, ‘I’ve got to start thinking more about my people, my country.'”

Which is why Ker will return to Cambodia in two months to meet with government and university officials about founding a film school there. And why he hopes to go back again in the fall to begin work on his first narrative feature-length film, “Holiday in Cambodia,” a story about refugees being repatriated after decades spent in the U.S.

In a sense, that would make the film a first-person narrative since the 38-year-old Ker is only now beginning to rediscover a country he never really knew.

Ker was just 2 when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge swept into power in Cambodia, persecuting intellectuals and anyone with Western ties, initiating a genocide that killed a reported 1 million to 2 million people. Ker’s father, Kenneth, a successful professional with a university degree in accounting and finance, was an easy target, so he, his wife, two sons and a daughter were sent to a reeducation camp.

All five fled to a refugee camp in Thailand after Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia four years later, where another daughter was born and, after a Southern California church group agreed to sponsor the family, the Kers came to the U.S. when Daron was about 9. But Ker’s youngest sister, Vuthona, the one born in the refugee camp, died just after her 20th birthday, partly due to the deprivations she suffered in Southeast Asia. “Rice Field of Dreams” is dedicated to her memory.

“I wanted to move forward, not remember anything,” the filmmaker says of his homeland. “When I went back, it was like everything started hitting me.”

“Rice Field of Dreams,” which screens at Long Beach’s Art Theatre on Wednesday — the start of Cambodia’s annual three-day New Year’s celebration — follows Cambodia’s first national baseball team from rural Baribo to Thailand to compete in the 2007 Southeast Asian Games. And the exhausting cross-border journey in a rickety bus mirrored the one Ker made as a child in ways that surprised him.

“These kids, they had a little TV on the bus and they only had one kung fu movie,” he says. “And these kids were watching the same movie for 16 hours. And I was thinking, that was me back on the refugee camp when I would watch the same movie over and over.

“My friend [would say,] ‘You’ve already seen it 10 times.’ So it was fascinating to see these kids, all the baseball kids, just watching the same movie over and over.”

Predictably, Cambodia’s fledgling baseball team was thrashed in the tournament, losing its five games by an average score of 23-3. But the quixotic vision of the team’s leader, an Alabama-based fellow survivor of the Khmer Rouge terror named Joeurt Puk, was realized simply because the team showed up.

If teaching rudimentary baseball skills to kids could have such an effect, Ker thought, what would happen if he taught young Cambodians the art of moviemaking and the enterprise of digital media?

“None of these kids are ever going to make it to major league baseball,” he says. “But filmmakers, it would help [the country’s] economic growth. These kids could use this training and get paid to do it.

“It’s a career, really.”

But it’s one Phillip Linson, vice dean of the American Film Institute Conservatory, says won’t be created overnight.

“It’s a little bit of a process,” says Linson who 15 years ago helped create a filmmaking program at what is now the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. “Are they going to create a film industry there? I don’t know. But do they have stories there that they want to tell and that they and other people will want to see? I think so.

“That takes some craft and takes some skill.”

While the vision is Ker’s, much of the funding and institutional know-how will come from his family, including an uncle, Ke Kim Yan, who is now a deputy prime minister in Cambodia.

Also involved is Ker’s accountant father, a bank manager in Cambodia who was forced to mow lawns to support his family after fleeing to Southern California in 1981. He provided some of the $200,000 Ker needed to finish “Rice Field of Dreams,” which is scheduled for a wider June release largely on Web-based platforms such as Hulu.

Financing a film is a little different from financing a film school, warns producer Michael Peyser (“Ruthless People,” “The Warrior’s Way”), a professor in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. But for the Kers, this is personal, and Peyser believes that will make a difference.

“They have great purpose and focus in doing it,” he says. “There has not been a film studies part of the culture. But they’re seeing it, a little bit, as an extension of what the country has to offer in terms of international profile after being shut off for so long.

“The possibility is there.”

So too is an artistic voice that is just beginning to be heard. In addition to Ker, Long Beach rapper Prach Ly, the Philadelphia hip-hop group AZI Fellas and the Los Angeles rock band Dengue Fever are giving expression to a generation of Cambodian immigrants exploring an identity forged in two continents.

“It’s a disrupted flow that is now finding its equilibrium,” Peyser says. “And in so doing, it will probably have a very interesting voice because they are Americans who were sort of transplanted — with no nicety about it — into America. They grew up as Americans and then they’ve discovered they’re Cambodians.

“And how do you create a connection to a past and also to your future? You tell stories.”

kevin.baxter@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times