2006 CUNY Asian American Film / Media Festival – Biographies

Masood Haque is a first year film student in the MFA program in Media Arts at City College in Harlem.  He just finished a fiction piece titled, “Diazapam”. Masood is currently working on his thesis documentary, about an Imam and his congregation in Brooklyn, titled, “Marriage, Mortgage and McDonalds”.

Winnie Ng is from Staten Island, NYC. She has been making films since she was 16 when she entered a filmmaking contest for urban youth. Sponsored by Showtime, she placed 5th out of hundreds, but unfortunately did not win the cash prize, and developed a new expensive hobby she could not afford. Since then, Winnie has been making shoestring films with the resources available to her, driven not by “Hollywood Standards” of production, but by narrative, creativity, and the simple pleasure of making something out of nothing. Her work focuses on family, Asian-Americanness, and the media.

Kaori Okano is from Kanazawa Japan. She finished the Film Production Certificate program at Brooklyn College in 2005. Her last film, “Dance Untitled”, was partly funded by Brooklyn College and was also supported by the Kodak World Wide Student program. Kaori worked for a Japanese TV network in NY for a year and also worked on various independent projects. She is now working on her own projects including a dance documentary and a feature script.

Alan Raquel was born in the Philippines, raised in San Francisco and currently lives in West Harlem. Alan has worked as a photographer for modeling agencies, community and theater groups and Filipinas magazine in San Francisco.  He entered City College a few years after moving to New York City where he is enrolled as an undergraduate with a double major in Media and Communication Arts (Film/Video) and Art (Electronic Design).

The films that Alan made so far at City College including “The Photograph” have been influenced by the Avant-garde movement particularly Soviet Montage and Constructivism. Studying film has also been an instrumental tool in the search and discovery of my roots and culture through the process of making documentaries. Alan would like to go to graduate school in film, continue his documentary on the Philippine Aeta indigenous people and make films that are devoid of classification but will move people on a social / political / emotional level.