To Ride a Cow 騎牛找馬

After I graduated from Berkeley and got turned down from UCLA film school the first time, I had decided to not wait for film school and start making films. The result became my first video short "To Ride a Cow" <<騎牛找馬>>.

It was the summer of 1992. I rounded up my best girl friend from college and my first boyfriend Mike and we started to shoot the video. We shot it in a few days and I edited it at the East Bay Media Center on Super VHS.

I couldn't find anyone who would do nudity so I decided to put myself in it. It was not an autobiographical piece. It's a fictional story about a girl and a boy who get together and bond when their bisexual lover goes away for the weekend.

I remember feverishly trying to finish off the piece before Mike drove me off to start grad school at Yale. At first, I was rather discouraged because my friends didn't seem to get or like the piece. I started sending it out to film festivals when I was at Yale and continued to make videos.

It just started snowing in New Haven when I got a mean call from the New England Film Festival complaining that I was short my entry fee payment. I grudgingly sent them a check for 10 bucks.

Two weeks later, I got a call from them and they said they wanted to invite me to Boston because I had won Best Student Video at the New England Film Festival. A couple of months later, I got a call from Hong Kong and heard that I won the First Prize at the Hong Kong Independent Film & Video Awards. It was judged by Tsui Hak who commented on how "exciting" my piece was.

Tony Rayns programed it into the Hong Kong International Film Festival and it started getting programed everywhere.

On its way to Tokyo Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, the film was seized by the customs because of frontal nudity. I guess I accidentally exposed myself in one of the sex scenes.

Oops.

Because of that, I was dubbed the new enfant terrible of queer cinema. Just a few years ago, I was dubbed the aging enfant terrible by a critic as Ethan Mao was released.

Those were the days.

"To Ride a Cow" was how I got started making videos... and I just posted the short in its entirety on Youtube in three parts:

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfwCAKex6Oo