Project Title: Poetry Inside Out (formerly known as Words from Another Tongue)
Recipient Organization: Center for the Art of Translation
Lead Artist: Joyce Lee
Genre and Date Awarded: Media Arts, June 2006
To Be Presented: Early 2008 submissions to festivals, public television, and bilingual and educational reform advocacy groups

Filmmaker Joyce Lee and the Center for the Art of Translation created “Poetry Inside Out,” a 30-minute video that explores growing up bilingual in the Bay Area. Lee collaborated with writers, teachers, and students participating in Poetry Inside Out, a creative writing and literary translation program founded by the Center that teaches bilingual children in schools around the Bay Area. The partners worked together to create a visually engaging film that offers a glimpse into several students’ lives and the insightful poetry they write as a unique way of expressing their feelings and opinions.

Over a year-long period students translated poems from different languages into English (and vice versa), and in the process, gained a deep understanding of words and began to see themselves as poets. Students are shown learning specific poetic forms and writing their own original poetry based on those forms. Their writing reveals brilliant imaginations filled with insight, happiness, grief, and awareness that help them cope in a not-so-perfect world. The film demonstrates that students can thrive and be masters of two languages when given resources and encouragement.

The film focuses on students like Carmen, a quiet 5th-grader who is already trilingual: she speaks Spanish and Mam (an indigenous Guatemalan language) at home, and English at school. Shy and soft-spoken, Carmen is nonetheless adamant when she says in the film that “For me, poetry is like a light that comes to save me… When poetry came, I could express myself in many ways."

Joyce Lee is an award-winning Asian American independent filmmaker and writer with a fine arts background in painting and drawing. Her debut film, Foreign Talk, was one of the few films that tackled racial tensions between African Americans and Asians after the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and received recognition for its cutting-edge form and content. Other films by Lee have garnered such awards as the Grand Jury Prize at the 1995 Chicago Asian American Film Festival and Best of Category at the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. She received a prestigious award and grant from ABC’s New Talent Scholarship Program for her feature comedy screenplay, “My Life as a Liar.”

Lee writes of her own childhood experiences, attending public schools as a child in the Pacific Northwest, “Speaking no English when I first attended elementary school, I was placed in a full English immersion program…. After years of public school with a handful of Asian American students who followed the same course of education that I did, I noticed that we all had one thing in common: we learned to be embarrassed about our native culture.”

Much of Lee’s work is influenced by her experience in America. Taking on subjects that offer a cross-cultural perspective, Lee addresses political and social issues in her work.
Her current production, “Paper Words,” explores the shortcomings of a public school through the eyes of a five-year-old student, Mei, who is misperceived as having a developmental issue when language and cultural barriers prevent her from interacting in the classroom. This latest endeavor is a compilation of many common American immigrant stories. “Paper Words” will be playing on PBS and in international festivals from 2008 onward.

She is also working on several screenplays which she hopes to turn into feature-length narratives in the coming future.

The Center for the Art of Translation, founded in 2000, promotes international literature and translation through the arts, education, and community outreach, sponsoring TWO LINES, a journal of literary translation, and Poetry Inside Out. The latter is the first imaginative writing program in Bay Area schools in which translation plays an essential part.

LEAD ARTIST

Joyce Lee

Projects

• Director, Co-Producer, “Poetry Inside Out” (2006-2008)
  
• Author, ABCs, FOBs, and My Love of Cheese, a comedic novel that explores the pitfalls of adolescence in a small town. Currently in process of becoming a screenplay (2004-06)
  
• Screenwriter/Director/Producer, “Circle,” a children’s narrative short screenplay about the impact of hatred upon a perpetrator and a victim, 15 minutes (2004)
  
• Screenwriter/Director/Producer, “Paper Words,” a CGI-animated 30-minute story about a young immigrant girl who is perceived as developmentally delayed when language and cultural barriers hinder her from interacting in class. Co-production with ITVS and CAAM (2003-present)
  
• Playwright, “Dinner Date,” a comedic skit for theatrical performance. Directed by Aaron Schmookler, Exit Theater, San Francisco (2003)
  
• Director/Editor/Producer/Screenwriter, “My Life as a Liar,” a 16mm short color film trailer of selected scenes from a feature-length script about a young woman who is haunted by her grandmother’s ghost as she keeps a secret life from her family. (2001-02)
  
• Director/Producer/Editor, “Grant Avenue,” a short documentary about a group of elderly tenants who fight their eviction in Chinatown. Festivals (2001)
  
• Director/Producer/Editor, “Thanatos,” a short 16mm black and white experimental documentary that explores life after death. Presented on local Fox network, aired on KCSM, and shown in film festivals; prize winner (1994-96)
  
• Director/Producer/Editor, “Foreign Talk”, a short film that explores interracial tensions after the LA riots of 1992. Awards, festivals, PBS.

Committees

• Jurist, San Jose Arts Commission (2007)
  
• Jurist and Jury Chair, San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Awards (1994-2002)

Grants and Awards

• Women In Film/General Motors Emerging Filmmaker Grant (2007)
  
• Individual San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant for Poetry Inside Out, (2007)
  
• Open Call Winner, ITVS, for “Paper Words” (2005)
  
• Media Fund Award Winner, Center for Asian American Media, for “Paper Words” (2005)
  
• ITVS Development Funds, ITVS, for “Paper Words, (2004)
  
• Robin Eickman Award, Film Arts Foundation, for “Paper Words” (2003)
  
• Funding Exchange/The Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media, for “Grant Avenue” (2002)
  
• ABC New Talent Scholarship Award, ABC/Disney, for “My Life as a Liar” (2001)
  
• National Educational Media Network Award, Bronze for “Thanatos” (1996)
  
• Film Arts Development Award, “Thanatos” (1995)
  
• Chicago Asian American Festival Grand Jury Prize, for “Foreign Talk” (1995)
  
• Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, Best of Category for Foreign Talk (1994