Baba with Skateboard, 2010.

How did you find the foster youth to make the movie, how did you connect?

This is a common question that comes up often for audiences after viewing AMERICA’S MOST UNWANTED.

As a film director, I like to imagine that I have a natural ability to create great first impressions and connect with a wide-variety of people. But I’m being facetious, for this ability, I blame my foster care experience.

Before my mother died of ailments from dialysis in the public health system, (another movie in and of itself), I had the opportunity to live with 5 different families. As she lay bedridden, for her final 3 years in a hospital, my brother and I moved, from home to home.

Each time we moved we had to follow new rules, eat new food, meet and make new friends at a new school, and more generally, just figure out how to fit in. Eventually, my mother died and I was placed in a professional foster home in another state, separated from my brother.

From those experiences, I became very skilled at figuring people out quickly and trying to make a connection. This skill has benefited my documentary work including my first video project, WRONG BATHROOM (2005), afterall, restroom safety is not an easy topic to discuss either.

Also helping me was the fact that foster youth have an instant connection with each other just by way of our shared experience. It’s like any subculture in society: a shared experience allows for a basic, and immediate repoire.

What’s unique for AMERICA’S MOST UNWANTED was the intensity of the connection and the kinship we were able to create from this experience. Most important to our ability to connect for this film, was the fact that our stories are not shocking to each other.

Nor was I, as the film director, ever really interested in the: ‘how I became a foster kid story’. Sure, this story is important, but for me, such stories fall into the dramatic, the passive, the victim state, and I was more interested in the here and now, the survivor, and the process of foster care on the present state of the youth’s experience.

My first interview, for AMERICA’S MOST UNWANTED was with Senator Mark Leno, before he became elected Senator, in 2007. I secured the interview by reaching out to his Deputy Director, Susan Sun, via an email.

My next interview, was secured by my friend Eugenie Belle, who connected me to Valerie Mason-John, aka ‘Queenie’, this amazing performance artist, author, and meditation teacher, was once also a foster youth and had natural ability on camera having once worked as an international journalist.

Melissa Lee, a former foster youth who works for ILP and CYC in San Francisco, introduced me to Teruko Dobashi around the same time. We spoke on the phone and a week later I was filming her graduation from high school at Jefferson High in Daly City, 2007.

I met Connor Baba through Matilda Stubbs, both of whom were involved with the Smith Society which assists foster youth in attending the University of California, Santa Cruz. Matilda was a graduate of the program and school, (I’m also a UCSC alumni but the Smith Society was not around yet). Connor was considering entering UCSC or any one of his many other options at the time: University of Chicago, UC-Davis, UC-Berkeley and Reed College. With all these colleges wanting him as a freshman, I had to have such a successful foster youth in my film!

Connor introduced me to Savi Roderick-Deffee. Savi and I connected instantly and the rest was cinematic history.

More than ten other foster youth, five foster parents and foster youth supporters were also interviewed to make this film. The resulting 21 minutes represents 4 years of editing from 40 hours of interviews.

This is a common question that comes up often for audiences after viewing AMERICA’S MOST UNWANTED.

As a film director, I like to imagine that I have a natural ability to create great first impressions and connect with a wide-variety of people. But I’m being facetious, for this ability, I blame my foster care experience.

Before my mother died of ailments from dialysis in the public health system, (another movie in and of itself), I had the opportunity to live with 5 different families. As she lay bedridden, for her final 3 years in a hospital, my brother and I moved, from home to home.

Each time we moved we had to follow new rules, eat new food, meet and make new friends at a new school, and more generally, just figure out how to fit in. Eventually, my mother died and I was placed in a professional foster home in another state, separated from my brother.

From those experiences, I became very skilled at figuring people out quickly and trying to make a connection. This skill has benefited my documentary work including my first video project, WRONG BATHROOM (2005), afterall, restroom safety is not an easy topic to discuss either.

Also helping me was the fact that foster youth have an instant connection with each other just by way of our shared experience. It’s like any subculture in society: a shared experience allows for a basic, and immediate repoire.

What’s unique for AMERICA’S MOST UNWANTED was the intensity of the connection and the kinship we were able to create from this experience. Most important to our ability to connect for this film, was the fact that our stories are not shocking to each other.

Nor was I, as the film director, ever really interested in the: ‘how I became a foster kid story’. Sure, this story is important, but for me, such stories fall into the dramatic, the passive, the victim state, and I was more interested in the here and now, the survivor, and the process of foster care on the present state of the youth’s experience.

My first interview, for AMERICA’S MOST UNWANTED was with Senator Mark Leno, before he became elected Senator, in 2007. I secured the interview by reaching out to his Deputy Director, Susan Sun, via an email.

My next interview, was secured by my friend Eugenie Belle, who connected me to Valerie Mason-John, aka ‘Queenie’, this amazing performance artist, author, and meditation teacher, was once also a foster youth and had natural ability on camera having once worked as an international journalist.

Melissa Lee, a former foster youth who works for ILP and CYC in San Francisco, introduced me to Teruko Dobashi around the same time. We spoke on the phone and a week later I was filming her graduation from high school at Jefferson High in Daly City, 2007.

I met Connor Baba through Matilda Stubbs, both of whom were involved with the Smith Society which assists foster youth in attending the University of California, Santa Cruz. Matilda was a graduate of the program and school, (I’m also a UCSC alumni but the Smith Society was not around yet). Connor was considering entering UCSC or any one of his many other options at the time: University of Chicago, UC-Davis, UC-Berkeley and Reed College. With all these colleges wanting him as a freshman, I had to have such a successful foster youth in my film!

Connor introduced me to Savi Roderick-Deffee. Savi and I connected instantly and the rest was cinematic history.

More than ten other foster youth, five foster parents and foster youth supporters were also interviewed to make this film. The resulting 21 minutes represents 4 years of editing from 40 hours of interviews.

Every morning I dream of help with transcribing. It’s such a perfect thing for someone interested in breaking into docs and the work is so valuable when we think about the change that will manifest from the resulting finished pieces.

Without studio funding projects like America’s Most Unwanted would take years to complete and also suffer from a lack of professional support and experience. House parties and trailer screenings, however; are ‘easy’ ways to raise quickly the much-needed funds for things like video tape, travel costs to interviews, and of course, raising money for larger budget items like music clearance, on-line editing, titles and more.

Just to prepare a documentary for PBS’s regulations, for instance, costs upwards of more than $10,000.

Well, my friend, YOU have the power to change this, at least for this project. If you throw a fundraiser or house party for America’s Most Unwanted, you can know that, not only are you supporting an important social justice film that will better the lives of foster youth, you are also changing the system of film making.

As a marginalized film maker focusing on marginalized subjects, my project is dependent on community support to meet its goals.  There is a  void in positive foster youth imagery–this void will start to close with the release of this film.  And YOU have the power to help make that happen!

Call up your local all ages venue and book it now! We need to book this six months in advance.

Why not get your friend’s amazing band? That great poet and DJ you heard last week, to support? Once you book the time, please write me, Shani and I will connect you with a press release, screener, photos and promotional ideas.

Once this film is broadcast:

• Thousands of empty nesters will be inspired to become foster parents.

• Foster youth will see positive images of themselves and know that they too can beat the odds set against them.

• All of us will learn about famous foster youth–WHO KNEW? I know I certainly did not and I’m a graduate of the foster care system.

Finally, who else to make such a film than a former foster youth?