Kudos for El Cerrito Filmmaker

Following its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival last month, a short film by El Cerritan Justin Tipping is currently showing in two Bay Area film festivals.

In the 21-minute film, NANI, a young tagger is caught and ordered to do community service at a nursing home. He meets an 84-year-old woman with dementia, and the pair develop an unexpected graffiti-spraying friendship.

NANI, which stars Tsai Chin (who appeared in The Joy Luck Club) and Johnny Ortiz, was Tipping's graduate thesis film from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in June.

Tipping, 26, who grew up in El Cerrito and graduated from El Cerrito High School in 2003, studied film at UC Santa Barbara. He now lives in Los Angeles.

The film appeared in the "Generation" category at Berlin. A statement about the film from the Generation director, Maryanne Redpath, said,

"As soon as we saw NANI during the selection process we knew it would be an instant favourite with the Generation 14plus audiences. The film works so well on many levels: The lead character is a teenager who is in some trouble with the authorities and is now forced to do social work. In a nursing home, he overcomes his coolness and preconceptions and finds something special in Isabel, a demented woman of 84 years, and an unlikely friendship begins. Opening up to her world, he becomes vulnerable, both emotionally and with regard to his responsibilities in the nursing home."

Tipping grew up in a bi-racial family, and the inter-generational relationship shown in the film is indirectly connected to his Filipino grandmother, his family said.

NANI has been showing with other shorts at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and at Cinequest in Silicon Valley. It is part of a joint "White Elephant" screening of shorts showing tonight, March 9, at 9:45 p.m., at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, and March 17, at 9 p.m., at Camera 3 Cinemas in San Jose.

The program for the Asian American Film Festival calls it a "bold and emotionally palpable story of a teenage graffiti artist and an aging woman. Through their misadventures of tagging the streets, they rediscover what it means to be alive."