Harper filmmakers take home new honors

Harper College Professor Kurt Hemmer and Media Productions Coordinator Tom Knoff spent a year turning footage from a campus visit by Beat Generation poet Ted Joans into a thoughtful documentary on his life, his work, and its effect on the numerous artists who knew him.

It paid off.

The film recently earned the duo an Honorable Mention from the Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival; that honor follows a Platinum Best of Show title from the Aurora Awards in March and, last fall, the Grand Festival Arts Award from The Berkeley Video & Film Festival.

“We're really proud. We spent a long time working on this, and to have it recognized by our peers is just an outstanding feeling,” Hemmer says. “This project primarily was intended to provide a more public look at the life of a fascinating person, and I think we accomplished that.”

Joans, who was born in Cairo, Ill. and died about a year after he visited Harper in 2002, interacted with a long list of respected names from his generation, Hemmer says – from Salvador Dali and Tennessee Williams to Malcolm X – and spent a great deal of time traveling the world.

Footage from his Harper visit is at the heart of Hemmer and Knoff's documentary, but the film also incorporates photos, footage from a 1950s reading in New York, and scenes of Harper students performing pieces of his work.

Hemmer and Knoff used funds from a Harper multicultural grant – intended to support work that promotes multicultural understanding – to help fund the project.

The Joans film is the third that the duo has done together. Their next project, “Keenan,” chronicles the legendary photographer Larry Keenan and will be screened at Berkeley in October.

The documentaries are used in Harper literature courses.