BY ALEX HO

In print | December 6, 2007

How does a Swarthmore graduate with a liberal arts, decidedly non-vocational education make a splash in the world of media? It’s a question that professor Patricia White was intent on answering as she began to establish the college’s Film and Media Studies program in 1999. White made a point of networking with alumni working comfortably in the media arts. One of them was PBS documentary filmmaker and producer Douglas Chang ‘84 who, White said, “was somebody I connected with right away.” Since then, Chang completed his first feature film, “Absent Father,” and White has invited him to present a sneak preview on Friday, Dec. 7 at 7 p.m. in Science Center 101 before the film goes on to any definitive distribution plan. Joining Chang is the band responsible for the film’s score, M.Fix, which is headed by multimedia artist Madaleine Fix-Hansen and incidentally includes Bryn Mawr College professor Homay King and Haverford College professor Gus Stadler. M.Fix will be performing at Olde Club at 9 p.m after the screening.

At first glimpse, “Absent Father” seems like another dispensable indie flick in the predictable Sundance mold — a teenage girl is faced with pregnancy and the fallacy of her middle-class existence. But the film has one big twist; its protagonist, Abigail (Jessica Kadish), has been impregnated by God. This premise, which brings a whole new level of irony to the film’s title, may recall yet another smug indie film, the satire “Saved!” Indeed, Chang said, “I had originally conceived the movie as almost a comedy.”

“But the film seemed to kind of take a life of its own and took a dark turn,” Chang said. “All of a sudden it became a fairly serious drama with some comic elements…stuck in the margins.” Perhaps the reason for the film’s serious take on its supernatural story is that Chang draws from a very real inspiration. The idea for “Absent Father” was conceived by Chang as he saw his good friend Allison Sherman struggle through a divorce and raise a two-year old son on her own. Sherman would later co-write and produce the film.

The other major impetus for Chang to make “Absent Father” was his interest in religion and faith. “My personal feeling is that there are a lot of people out there who sense that something’s missing, that the normal realms of their experience are not quite adequate to explain what they actually feel and wish for. How they try to express that and how they try to fill that void is a fascinating thing. Religion is one very, very strong way that people try to find that connection,” Chang said. “I thought why not take it head on and really look at somebody who’s facing a religious dilemma taken at face value.” It’s about as face value as a religious dilemma can get. As implied by the title, Abigail is left pregnant without God’s support. Chang describes his film as more Book of Job than nativity story.

In bringing the tale of the virgin conception to today’s world, Chang hopes to explore “the disparity between a kind of older faith-driven view of the world with a modern view of the world.” According to Chang, “Absent Father” was heavily inspired by two classics, Carl Theodore Dreyer’s “The Passion of the Joan of Arc,” the 1928 silent film that revolutionized the close-up in film grammar, and Jean Luc Godard’s 1962 “Vivre Sa Vie” (“My Life to Live”), which looked at how the former film “is treated in much more modernist terms.” Chang said. “In some ways, my film is an attempt to reconcile the two, to try to find how the two are both different sides of the same coin.”

Chang doesn’t view his feature debut as very different from his career in documentary filmmaking. He felt that his crew worked more like a documentary crew than a big studio production, in part because of a limited budget, but also because “I love the way documentaries are made,” Chang said. “They have skeleton crews…There’s a lot of scraping around, but people are kind of pushed to bring a lot of creativity to their jobs, whether they’re a PA or the director.”

Chang felt that documentaries afforded him a deeper understanding of film. “When you look at a film, on some level, you’re looking at something very real, and on some level you’re just looking at a projection on a wall. I think that having a training in documentary…is vital [to learning] what film is capable of capturing in terms of reality and what it isn’t.” Chang also credits the single film class available at Swat when he was an undergrad. “There was very little in the way of resources, but I think the grounding that I got just from learning from [retired professor Kaori] Kitao’s class … was in terms [of] really understanding the language.”

It’s the genuinely independent nature of Chang’s filmmaking that has White excited about introducing his work to students. “As somebody who has been working in various media sectors and really not doing the mainstream thing, Doug would have a lot to say to current students who are interested in film from all different angles,” White said.

The future of “Absent Father” is still up for grabs, and it’s not likely that you’ll find a theatrical release stateside anytime soon. Having participated in the Religion Today Film Festival in Rome, Italy this past October, Chang has been making connections abroad, where there seems to be greater interest in his film. Still, Chang said, “My background in the PBS world has sort of made me think about kind of outreach possibilities, where the film can actually reach groups that would respond to the story in a special way … I’d love for religious people to see it, even if they think it’s controversial.” Chang wants to go “beyond just marketing the film to really looking at who stands to benefit from the question that arises from a film like mine.” Particularly, Chang said, “I think the people who’ve responded very strongly to the film tend to have gone through some period of real loss or mourning that they’ve not always been able to express to other people or to quite understand themselves, and hopefully, the film seems to hit a note with them.”

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