Photograph courtesy of Laura Zaylea and David Yun.Queer women’s bicycle group, The Fuses, from Hold the Sun. March 2010Local Filmmaker Features Potrero’s People and PlacesBy Lori HigaHold the Sun, which screens at this month’s San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, was co-directed by two Potrero Hill residents. And while filmmaker Laura Zaylea, who lives on 24th and De Haro streets, filmed her debut feature “all over San Francisco,” many prominent scenes were shot in on the Hill, Mission Bay and Dogpatch. Co-director David Yun lived in Dogpatch while attending graduate school at San Francisco Art Institute, where the two met while studying for their master of fine art degrees, which they earned in 2008. And Zaylea’s partner and Hold the Sun’s sound designer Jennifer Rarick works at California College of the Arts in Showplace Square. The movie revolves around a band of queer female bicyclists called The Fuses. Most of their scenes were filmed in Potrero Hill, mainly under the highway bridge by the Pennsylvania Street Caltrain station. “I love this area because the contrast between the local scenery and the Bay Bridge makes it look incredibly tall, so the visual feeling is very powerful. We also filmed wide shots of The Fuses riding under a beautiful silver-gray sky on Mariposa, Illinois and Iowa Street by Caltrain, and then Terry A. Francois Blvd. by the water. I wanted to have The Fuses ride up the big hills around 18th and Kansas street, but we decided that wouldn’t have been fair to our actors!” laughed Zaylea. The low-budget film, shot in high definition video, tells the story of three queer women whose disconnected lives intersect through common experiences of loneliness, alienation, and unfulfilled longings. There’s a taxidermist who is seen working with animal corpses and pieces of fur; a travel writer who never leaves her apartment while reading stories to herself; and a misanthropic, isolated artist who suffers from a creative block, able only to do paint-by-number canvasses which she attempts to sell as her own on ebay. While gorgeously shot, the film has little to no dialogue, and may have one too many long, drawn-out, meditative moments, a la Ingmar Bergman, making it difficult to sit through. However, Hold the Sun’s exceptional cinematography, moments of magical realism, production design and sophisticated score – by local husband and wife musician team Jeannette Faith and Wes Steed – demonstrate the filmmakers’ promise. Hold the Sun will screen on March 14, 1:30 p.m. and March 15, 7 p.m. at Viz Cinema in North Beach. For more information about the festival and the film: http://filmguide.festival.asianamericanmedia.org/tixSYS/2010/xslguide/eventnote.php?EventNumber=1040.
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