(upbeat music) - Welcome to TV Film.

I'm Jermaine Wells.

TV Film showcases the talents of upstate New York media makers across all genres, and in this episode, we present three short films.

The first film is a poignant look at the power of true connection.

A young life ended by tragedy at the onset of the AIDS epidemic and a love that still endures.

"Dear Lily, Love Patrick" is directed by Jen Bartels.

- One of the characters in the film, Lily, is my mother and the other character is a man named Patrick Callie who was a San Francisco based, an innovator of high energy music, which is kind of like an up tempo disco or like an electronic dance music.

This project was originally intended to be a short documentary about Patrick's life and career.

And I was in pre-production and making plans to travel to San Francisco and then COVID hit.

So I couldn't go anywhere and I still wanted to do the project.

And so I was like in my apartment and I'm just like, what do I have?

Like, what do I have to work with?

And I had these letters.

I had like a handful of letters that my mother had held onto all these years from Patrick.

And so I just started reading them and then reading them over and over and over again.

And that's how it kind of ended up being like, not so focused on his life and career, but more focused on their friendship.

I think I would imagine that a lot of music producers today are aware of who he is and aware of his contribution even if, you know, people like you and me aren't.

And that's like really important to me too.

If in some small way, this film is like part of the canon of work about him and just, you know, kind of showing another side to who he was, like that feels really special to me too.

And I think things happen like that sometimes.

And you end up with something even better than you set out for.

(sombre music) ♪ Pat ♪ ♪ Pat Cowley ♪ ♪ Patrick Joseph Cowley ♪ ♪ Patrick Joseph Paul Cowley ♪ ♪ He's the skeptical steel rim pad ♪ ♪ At the post ♪ - [Jen] I wrote this with a friend in the spring of 1970 when we were at Niagara University and we recorded it on my little reel-to-reel tape recorder.

♪ Happy, solid Pat on dope ♪ ♪ Oh, Pat, knows where it's at ♪ - I don't really remember a specific time when we first encountered each other, but I do know that we met each other early on in freshman year and that we became fast friends instantly.

♪ You won't regret it ♪ - We spent hours sitting around the student center and we used to walk across the the train tracks that crossed the campus, talking and laughing and you know, just being young.

♪ Let me tell you, Pat ♪ - I very much remember spending time with Pat at his parents' house in Buffalo.

In his bedroom, Pat had covered some of the walls with aluminum foil and every inch was covered with posters.

♪ No, he's groovy ♪ - And I remember walking around Buffalo, just Patrick and I, in my braless barefoot waist, long hair days.

And if anyone dared to stare at me, Patrick would bellow "Don't look at her".

And we just dissolved into hysterical laughter.

♪ Pat, Pat, Pat ♪ (upbeat music) - Patrick went out to San Francisco and he came out and he revelled in his newfound freedom to explore a different kind of life.

One that he could, you know, sink into as his true self.

I followed a much more traditional route of marrying and having children and everything that goes along with that.

Our lives could not have diverged more dramatically, but somehow that disparity mattered not one wit to our friendship.

It was a bond and a love that was impervious to geographical separation.

And even to times when our contact may have been sporadic.

(calm music) - We both shared a passionate love of music.

So that was a real bond between us.

When Pat heard music, he could clearly distinguish all the different instruments and their discreet melody lines.

He had such a refined perception.

He found his life's true mission in an extraordinarily creative, innovative outpouring of this visionary music that just flowed from his mind and heart.

(upbeat music) - Well, of course, since we were separated by a continent and I rarely saw him, it was always exciting when Patrick came to visit us.

He loved meeting you and spending time with you.

And he was happy that dad and I had this great little family.

On one visit after everyone but he and I had gone to bed, it was a very hot summer night and we sat at the kitchen table together and he improvised a song with his guitar about the wretched heat.

And the chorus was It's too damn hot.

No one in my entire life has ever made me laugh like Pat did.

His sense of humor was so smart and quick and hilarious.

And we laughed so much.

I don't recall when or how I found out about Patrick's illness.

At the time, I don't think I had a clear grasp of the fact that Patrick was likely dying.

It was only a couple of months before Pat died that the CDC even started using the term AIDS.

And I know that Patrick was one of the first 400 or so fatalities from AIDS in the US.

He called me late one night.

I think it was around 11 o'clock.

And we had a conversation that lasted an unusually long time.

It must have been around 1:00 or 1:30 in the morning or so before we hung up, we didn't talk about death in my recollection, although I'm not sure what we touched on in our conversation, but when he died shortly thereafter, I understood that that call was Patrick's goodbye to me.

Most people, if they're lucky, at some point in their lives make an instant connection with someone in whom they recognize it.

A kindred spirit, someone with whom they just sink, someone whose mind and spirit fits with theirs like a piece of a larger puzzle.

In life, when you encounter someone who to you is endlessly interesting, simpatico with a shared sensibility and values, you understand on the deepest level that that person is a gift, a treasure and you hold onto that treasure as one of the things that makes your life worth living.

It will live inside of me until I'm gone too.

- In the next film, filmmaker Jeanette Lam tells the story of Gina Kim, founder and owner of Sunhee's Farm and Kitchen in Troy, New York.

- So we filmed this short doc around the same time we created the 518 Asian Alliance.

But first women led intergenerational support and advocacy collective for Asian Americans in the capital region.

In the capital region, there's a less than 5% Asian population.

So we thought it was really important to collectivize and to uplift and honor, and preserve the stories of women who are already here and who have been leading change and creating such positive impact in the community.

And so I thought Gina was like a great pillar of that.

Not only is she the founder of this restaurant, but she works in the kitchen herself.

And then during the lunch breaks, we go to a building next door and she's the one that's teaching the English classes.

And so she's wearing so many hats and I want to honor and highlight all of that and being able to squeeze everything that she does into a short video, I think, was pretty challenging.

I think a lot of the times, the stories around Asian people, specifically Asian women are that we are very quiet and submissive and docile and we just like keep our heads down and follow the rules.

But what Gina's doing with her restaurant is actually super radical.

Like she created this space and she's creating completely different pillars of education and community building that make it accessible to people.

I grew up in Virginia and I wasn't around many Asian people.

And so being able to make a film about this Asian woman that I saw so much of myself in, I think that really changed the way I was able to ask questions because we kind of had a shared unspoken language.

Culturally, our parents don't really say, I love you.

That's not really something that they were taught, but their way of showing love is by asking like, "have you eaten yet?"

Working with Gina really taught me a lot about her, but also taught me a lot about myself and allowed me to appreciate my own culture in a different way.

I think films are meant to mobilize us to take action or learn deeper about a story.

I think they're really supposed to be the catalyst and not the end of learning about something.

So I would just say for anyone who's Asian or not that wants to continue supporting API stories to support local businesses in the capital region.

- Growing up, I love you was not a regular thing where you say, "Hey, like, love you, bye".

I would hear that with a lot of my white friends and always wondered why I didn't hear it the same way.

We'd be asked when we'd come home.

It's like, "oh, did you eat?"

"Did you eat?"

Like, "have you eaten yet?"

All of those like small phrases and questions were ways to say I love you because they didn't know how to say that themselves.

My name is Gina Kim.

I am the owner and founder of Sunhee's Farm and Kitchen, a Korean restaurant in downtown Troy.

I immigrated here when I was three years old.

Having grown up in the area, I knew exactly what level of exposure people had to Korean food.

Before we started, there were only a total of three Korean restaurants within like a 100-mile radius.

And I think that's something that I wanted to change.

Food is that expression of love that is unspoken and can be even deeper in the way it is prepared.

The love and attention and the details that go into cooking is reflective of that love.

Our menu is very simple.

It really falls in line with who I am as a Korean American meddling in both worlds and also creating a third, you know, cross-cultural world that is completely different from just being Korean or just being American.

I think the biggest and most notable item on our menu is our kimchi.

We even have something called (speaking in Korean), which literally means the taste of your hands.

They say that depending on who it is and whose hands it is that actually, you know, rubs and puts all the kimchi together that even with the exact same recipe, the taste of the kimchi will actually be different.

We are a business by immigrants and for immigrants.

I think employment and education go hand in hand.

And so those are kind of our main pillars in deciding our model of using the workplace as a learning space as well.

Our staffing comprises of people from, you know, all over the world.

We'll offer English classes throughout the week and make sure that we shut down the restaurant in between lunch and dinner shifts.

So staff can attend if they choose to.

We serve people from all types of backgrounds, 30 different countries, 20 different spoken languages, economic backgrounds, social backgrounds, our classes are about building up confidence and building community with one another.

- [Man] Yeah.

- That's a hard one (laughs).

In an area where there are such few Asians and Asian Americans, being involved with the 518 Asian Alliance is extremely empowering.

And then even internally, just like really encouraging seeing other female strong, passionate figures coming to light has been really revolutionizing to see that here, in the capital region.

I've always seen that in bigger cities and other areas, but I always felt isolated and alone in this area.

I want people to know that we are here.

We don't want to stay silent anymore.

We want to fight for the things that we believe is right.

And the things that we believe in it, it really comes down to like honoring and, and respecting the dignity that's in each and every one of us.

It goes beyond just my own.

It goes beyond my restaurant and my community.

I think it's looking at people who have been traditionally not represented or you know, trampled over.

I'm fighting so that we can all be confident in our own humanity.

(upbeat music) - Finally, Harris Billeci shares a cautionary tale in the short animation, The Big Black Snake.

- It's quite simple and quite short.

It's a large monstrous snake representative of crude oil pipelines that emerges from the ground in the United States and then grows larger and engulfs the world.

I was getting a lot of content pushed at me on the internet about trying to stop the construction of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline.

They were doing new construction on this crude oil pipeline that was going from Canada down to I think Wisconsin.

And a lot of people didn't want that to happen.

A lot of people were saying it was unnecessary and only going to cause, you know, significant ecological damage because pipelines do leak.

And it was also another issue because it was indirect violation with treaties with the Anishinaabe people in Minnesota.

And I was feeling very helpless.

I couldn't go out to the Midwest to protest 'cause I was in school working.

And so I thought I could try to do something involved with it.

So I took with permission, a clip from a song that was like a protest song about the situation and just kind of did a visualization of it.

(guitar music) ♪ Well, a big black snake is crawling ♪ ♪ Across this land ♪ ♪ Guessed Great Mother Earth as it slithers through the sand ♪ ♪ The corner to right warn us and make us understand ♪ ♪ Black snake is moistening his land ♪ ♪ No more big black snakes through the sacred land ♪ - Learn more about the films and filmmakers in this season of TV Film at wmht.org/tvfilm.

And be sure to connect with WMHT on social media.

I'm Jermaine Wells.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] TV Film is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.