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Dear Friends,

Welcome to my Home Page!

Summer is gone and there were no travels, except for the imaginary ones and a work-related one. The pictures that friends sent me from Ireland and India made me journey to faraway places. The work related trip was to an imaginary Paris, but this time it was not France, rather Las Vegas: the annual California School Employees Association (CSEA) convention, where I was a delegate for the first time.

There was the intimate "Holiday and other shorts" screening at the end of June, in the small but lovely theatre at Bresee Community Center. Now we are working towards the 2008 Youth Film Festival on Social Justice, which will be tentatively titled "Home Sweet Home". For more information you can contact Bresee at (213) 387 - 2822.

A few weeks ago, on a short flight to San José, I picked up at the airport a copy of Joan Didion's "Where I Was From" (2003). A truly inspiring memoir, part autobiography and part historical document, it confirmed what I've always known since I first came to California: Didion is my favorite writer. She has been enlightening me about California since the "White Album". Her sense of observation and subtle irony pervade this book as well as all of her work. This is a segment where she describes the work of California-born painter Thomas Kinkade: "A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire." Then she goes on describing the "Kinkade Glow", with an unsettling but totally justified comparison with Mark Twain's comments about the painter Bierstadt. Finally she asks: "...is Thomas Kinkade's Sierra in fact any more sentimentalized than that of Albert Bierstadt?" In fact, it is the "sinister" and "lurid effect" of "Kinkade's Sentimental Glow" that makes his paintings absolutely unattractive to me.

If you are interested in contacting me directly to sign up for my filmmaking workshop or purchase prints and DVD copies of my films or my still photography, you can do so by sending an .

Best regards from Los Angeles,

Monica Gazzo

Brief Bio (for more detailed information, please refer to the Résumé page):
Monica Gazzo is a graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA). Her films have been shown at the Directors Guild of America, Hollywood, Los Angeles Filmforum, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood), Melnitz Theatre at University of California, Los Angeles, New Festival at NYU, New York City, Cleveland International Film Festival, Cleveland, Ohio, MadCat Women's International Film Festival, Angels Gate Cultural Center, Anais Nin Video & Film Diary Festival, Big Sur, California, 18th Street Arts Complex, Santa Monica, Society for Cinema Studies Conference, New Orleans, LA, State University at Binhampton (SUNY), Film Arts Festival, Roxie Cinema, San Francisco; UC Theater, Berkeley, Beaubourg Pompidou Center, Paris and the London Filmmaker's Coop, amongst other venues. She has received grants from the City of Los Angeles, Cultural Affairs and Youth Services Department, Long Beach Museum of Art / Video Annex, the Ahmanson Foundation, the California Arts Council, the California Community Foundation, the Italian Cultural Institute and others. thers.

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