By
Angela Orlando
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Two UA-affiliated filmmakers, Minda Marin and Lucy Petrovic, both won awards for their creations this week from the 10th annual Arizona International Film Festival.
Marin, a former UA student, won the best feature documentary prize for her film, "A.K.A. Kathe." She said she was "pleasantly surprised" to win the award for her film, which took three years to complete.
Marin said she makes films because of what she calls an "artistic passion." This exuberance, combined with her social nature, helps her form trust-based relationships.
Marin said the story for the film was a difficult one to obtain interviews for due to its nature - it follows a friend of Marin's named Aunt Kathe, a prostitute and drug addict in Phoenix, who was shot and killed. Her story became the basis and inspiration for the film.
Kathe had two sisters who were also prostitutes in Phoenix. Interviews with the sisters' children were instrumental in helping her research the film.
"At first Kathe's family did not want me to show their faces on film," Marin said. "Eventually they ended up trusting my legitimacy."
She added that "A.K.A. Kathe" is a highly political film in which the Phoenix judicial system mirrors that of South Tucson, Marin said.
"The man who shot Kathe claimed that she said she needed a ride somewhere," Marin said. "He was only charged with negligent homicide, and released after only one year of jail time."
Though she thinks the film ended on a dark note, Marin emphasized her desire to convey hope and the transformations which take place within her characters.
"I want the film to go on TV," Marin said. "I want it to get on a station with a wide audience, but it will probably end up as a counseling tape against drug use. No artist wants their work to just end up on a shelf somewhere."
Marin, currently teaching filmmaking in Singapore, said she intends to keep making films.
"Living in a completely different culture gives you strength and a whole new perspective on your own culture," she said.
Like Marin, Petrovic, a media arts professor, also won an award from the festival for her four-minute exploratory documentary "On the Subject of Sex."
Petrovic said the film is simultaneously personal and somewhat anonymous. It won the festival's most prestigious "Best of Arizona" award.
To make the film, Petrovic interviewed seven middle-aged women about their sexuality, compiling their responses into a cinematic disclosure. She calls her film "a candid and intimate portrayal of women's sexuality."
Through the musical creativity of her friend Kip Haaheim, Petrovic was able to disguise the women's voices so "you can't exactly tell which woman is speaking when," she said.
"(Haaheim's) electronic musical background also gave the film a sense of lots of audio and visual elements working together, at the same time," Petrovic added.
At the time of the film's inception, Haaheim was an assistant visiting music professor at the UA.
Even so, short films are still very expensive to make. Petrovic could not, however, gauge exactly how much she would have spent on the film's creation were it not for UA's material contributions.
"A university grant gave me a mini digital video camera," Petrovic said, "and I borrowed other departmental equipment for the editing," - which she performed herself.
Petrovic intends to keep the film circulating by entering it in nationwide film festivals.
Winners of the Arizona festival's awards each received a commemorative marble sculpture, which was designed by Tucson artist Ed Davenport.
"It's beautiful," Petrovic said about the award. "It's especially nice because it unites two artistic communities at once - filmmakers and sculptors."
