Happy Halloween! /  by H.P. Mendoza


Pictures of the cast and crew of I Am a Ghost at the Hawaii International Film Festival.
Photo 1: H.P. Mendoza, Jeannie Barroga, Anna Ishida and L.A. Renigen pose in front of a Yes, We're Open sign.
Photo 2: Titus Chong (moderator, HIFF), H.P. Mendoza, Anna Ishida, Jeannie Barroga on microphone, L.A. Renigen.
Photo 3: Producer Mark Del Lima with partner H.P. Mendoza in a rare photo, together
Photo 4: Anna Ishida shields her eyes on the balcony of the HIFF Hospitality Lounge

What a crazy month! I Am a Ghost had 8 screenings at Pollygrind, DC Asian, Hawaii International, Tucson Terrorfest, TriCity Fantastic Fest, Boston Asian, Shudder Fest and Bram Stoker UK and walked away withBEST DIRECTOR and BEST ACTRESS at Tucson Terrorfest! We're so honored and thrilled!

We're a little bloodshot from traveling, and there are more festivals coming up (in four days, to be exact) so let's rest and share some San Francisco news. Anna Ishida is being honored with a San Francisco Bay Guardian GOLDIE AWARD for Theatre and I'm being honored by SF Film Society along with film critic Judy Stone, quarterly DVD magazine Wholphin, film festival volunteer extraordinaire Ninfa Dawson and and filmmaker Terry Zwigoff for Essential SF!

This is a good year of recognition. As the year comes to a close and I Am a Ghost travels to more festivals, it's time to start thinking about distribution. These laurels sure would look good on a poster or Blu-Ray cover. :)

EDIT: We just won BEST PICTURE at the Bram Stoker International Film Festival in the UK!
Check out the gorgeous award that's being shipped to us! 

I can't list all of the upcoming fests yet, until they officially announce, but here is where you can see us next:

SAN DIEGO ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL
November 2 @ 9:15pm
November 6 @ 8:00pm

ST. LOUIS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

November 17th @ 11:59pm

Remember, we're a team of two, Mark Del Lima and me. We don't have the millions of dollars to make television commercials or post billboards and advertisements everywhere. All we have is the time we put into outreach, social networking and blogging. This outreach includes making trailers, spots and posters. Couple that with the amount of money and work we put into festival submissions and deliverables, and you have a pretty clear picture of how independent a film can be. The festival circuit is a pure experience: we make the movie, you come to watch it. But it can only continue through people like you, so remember:

I AM A GHOST on IMDb (Rate us!!!)
I AM A GHOST on facebook
I AM A GHOST on twitter

And here are two videos, from us to you, to enjoy this Halloween.

Round Two! /  by H.P. Mendoza

I had the chance to take August and September to work on some other projects I'd neglected for a while, as well as work at IDEO which is always intense and fulfilling (if not intensely fulfilling). But now, October is upon us. It's round two.

I'm so grateful and humbled by all of the attention our film has been getting, and I'd like to ask everyone who has said anything nice about I Am a Ghost to click on the following link to either Rate, Like or Follow the film:

I AM A GHOST on IMDb (Rate us!!!)
I AM A GHOST on facebook
I AM A GHOST on twitter

We ended round one of the fests with 9 screenings in Mexico City as part of Mix Mexico and Macabro Mexico City International Film Festival. We kick off this second round of festivals with the Pollygrind Film Festival in Las Vegas, a genre festival celebrating its 3rd year.

9/28 - Pollygrind Film Festival
10/5 - DC Asian Film Festival
10/13 - Hawaii International Film Festival
10/26 - Boston Horror Film Festival (co-presented by the Boston Asian Film Festival)
10/27 - Bram Stoker Film Festival of the UK
11/2 - San Diego Asian Film Festival

There are more festivals coming up, but I can't officially announce them, yet.

And here are some NEW review links!

"GRADE: A
Smart, original, and unsettling. Highly recommended for fans of ambitious horror films." - Joe Bendel, Libertas Film Magazine

"WONDERFUL!
[I Am a Ghost] will spark a complex dialogue for years to come." - David Calbert, Arts Engine

"FANTASTIC!
It's one of the most original and remarkable ghost stories I've ever seen. From a style and atmosphere perspective, it is very Kubrickian in appearance and tone but from a purely conceptual standpoint, it's unlike anything you've ever seen. The last twenty minutes of this film are some of the most intense and incredibly terrifying moments I've seen in a genre film this year. " - James Cortez, Planet of Terror

A TOUR-DE-FORCE PERFORMANCE!
Mendoza made the best casting decision of his career." - Chris Hallock, All Things Horror

"Lensed, scored, and edited with a skill so methodical and "savant" in nature, it's almost jarring to watch something so rooted in technical brilliance. - Chris Conduit, The Conduit Speaks

"UNCOMMONLY SCARY!
Destined to be a cult classic." - Brian Hu, San Diego Asian Film Festival


Thank you all for supporting the film for this long! We're halfway through the festival run and the movie keeps finding its audience, thanks to the word-of-mouth and general support from all of you. And remember:

I AM A GHOST on IMDb (Rate us!!!)
I AM A GHOST on facebook
I AM A GHOST on twitter



More soon! H.P. 

H.P.

New York! /  by H.P. Mendoza

Wow, what a trip. I'm home for a few days, having landed back in San Francisco, yesterday, before I head back to New York. The screening of I Am a Ghost at The Chelsea Clearview in Manhattan was a success. Unfortunately, neither Anna Ishida nor Mark Del Lima could make it out to New York. Rick Burkhardt and Jeannie Barroga were in attendance for a really in-depth Q&A that bled into the surprisingly well attended afterparty/meet-and-greet, afterward.

Martha Tien, Sophia Giddens and Lesley Qin of the New York Asian American Film Festival all made the whole process very approachable, and I STILL managed to not see everyone at the afterparty. I discovered that a bunch of people came to the screening from out of town! When I asked them how they heard of the film, they mentioned the Dread Central article:

"Buzz Growing Around H.P. Mendoza's I Am a Ghost" - Dread Central

It's because of this article that I suddenly started receiving lots of requests from festivals, journalists and filmmakers. And it brought these horror fans to The Chelsea Clearview. Some from Philadelphia, some from Pittsburgh and one very knowledgable guy from New Jersey who seemed to have all of the same touchpoints that I had, which told me that he had to have been my age. Within minutes of talking to them, I felt like the film has found its audience. Thank you to Avery Guerra and Doctor Gash from Dread Central for the coverage!

I was happy and proud to see so many people in the audience, lots of whom were fellow filmmakers, composers, actors and playwrights. I had to catch up with a lot of them via facebook, though, because it was next to impossible for me to talk to everyone by the time the party was over.

And after doing a bunch of interviews and trying to get reviews, they're starting to trickle in, and I want to post this one by Joe Bendel.

"SMART, ORIGINAL AND UNSETTLING! Anna Ishida [gives] an extraordinary performance." - Joe Bendel, j.b. spins 

As more pieces trickle in, I'll post them here. But for now, I'm signing off with a thank you to everyone who supported the film in New York. Thank you ACV, Dread Central, Quiet Earth, Core, Bram Stoker Film Festival, B-Movie Celebration, Avery Guerra, Darryl Pierce, Frederick Gorey, Courtney Jones, Nicholas Reiner, Robert Hood, Chris Evangelista, Lewis Tice, Robert Hood, Susan Chinsen, Chucho Quintero and Edna Campos. In the course of one week, so much attention has been thrown on I Am a Ghost, and I'm so thankful.

Oh, and by the way...we also got accepted to: 
MACABRO: Mexico City International Film Festival!

More on that, later. ;) 

H.P

"AMAZING! I Am a Ghost [will] scare the life out of the living." - Jamie Laughlin, Dallas Observer /  by H.P. Mendoza

I'm picking the Dallas Observer article because it "gives good pull-quote". But during my festival stay at theAsian Film Festival of Dallas, I Am a Ghost has been covered by three Dallas publications, which is beyond flattering! One of the pieces is for the Dallas Voice, an interview by Arnold Wayne Jones. 

HAUNTED FILMMAKER, by Arnold Wayne Jones, Dallas Voice
Click here to read the interview.

The festival was amazing and I got to spend time with directors Dave Boyle and Mye Hoang of Daylight Savings and Viette, respectively, and they showed me around seeing as how I'd never been to Dallas before.

With the hospitality and general warmth of the AFFD crew, headed by Alicia Chang and Steve Norwood, the I Am a Ghost experience was warm, welcoming and supportive - everything I was told to expect from the South. :)

Thank you, AFFD, for the familial treatment and especially for the genuine and heartfelt support (even if executive director Alicia Chang covered her eyes and turned her back to the screen for the final 20 minutes...hahaha) 

H.P.

★★★★★ "POWERFUL! A meaningful work of art." - Jonathan Newman, Philadelphia Examiner /  by H.P. Mendoza

Well, it's been a busy month for I Am a Ghost.


We had a midnight screening at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, an amazing venue set in a sanctuary built by architect Frank Furness. We also had two screenings in Mexico as part of MIX Mexico, but three more screenings were added making for a total of FIVE screenings!

Unfortunately, none of us were able to attend any of these screenings, but we were reviewed in the Philadelphia Examiner!

Click HERE to read the review!

One of my favorite parts of the review is this:

"Anna Ishida, an actress whose prodigious talent and emotional capacity carry the film forward and enable Mendoza's whole enterprise...can be seen as an eerie correlation to Nicole Kidman's role in Amenabar's work, and arguably displays a much more powerful performance than Kidman was ever able to summon."

I agree. Anna Ishida's performance is something to behold and I'm glad someone has finally written about it in a review. (ed. It was written in Filmbalaya that "Anna Ishida's portrayal of the ghost was simply terrific.")

Thanks to all who came to the midnight screening a Stay tuned for future postings about Dallas, New York and more! 

H.P.

The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival! /  by H.P. Mendoza

Wow. VC (Visual Communications) sure knows how to throw a festival. It was quite a week. A week that led up to a night that I was not ready for. A night that shook me so much it left me ending my sentences in prepositions.

I'm at the awards ceremony, sitting at my table with the guys from Sunset Stories, Valley of Saints and Derek Nguyen of Seeing Red. Parvesh Cheena and Iris Yamashita are presenting awards. I'm noticing how well spoken and confident the winners all seem. I'm just about to lean over to Derek to ask if the winners were notified way in advance when suddenly my name is called for Best Screenplay for Yes, We're Open! I'm so stunned, and cameras are going off (there are pics of me floating around, at my table looking like an idiot that I won't share here) that it takes me a while to get to the podium. Before I get to the microphone, Yes, We're Open producer Theresa Navarro sends me a text saying "Hooray! Best Screenplay!" Theresa was in New York. Apparently, everybody was ready for this award but me.

So, I give my speech. Or, "speech". And as I'm giving my speech, my phone is vibrating like crazy in my hand. (I was busy taking pictures of all of the award winners with my iPhone when I was called on to stage, and didn't have the wherewithall to know where to put it during my "speech".) As I sit back down after the speech in qutotation marks, I look at my phone and notice a ton of tweets, texts and facebook notifications. One of them reads, "Congrats on getting Best of SF Weekly!" I'm too shaken to even know what that means, so I shove my vibrating phone back in my pocket.

After the awards ceremony, I'm walking around trying to say my goodbyes (I had to hop in a cab to the airport to catch a flight to San Francisco, ASAP) and my congratulations to all of my friends. I'm also trying to find the space to text and or call Rich Wong and the rest of the Yes, We're Open crew. I see Parvesh standing in the middle of the courtyard and I'm wondering if he'll remember me from the time we met for 3.5 second during Fruit Fly in New York. I walk up to him and introduce myself, and sure enough he remembers those 3.5 seconds as if it were only 2 years and 10 months ago. He introduces me to his boyfriend Gregory and tells me that he thought the script for Yes, We're Open was really funny. I tell him that means a lot coming from him. He then asks me to stop and it suddenly becomes a contest about which brown guy can blush harder.

I hop in a cab to LAX and I decide to go through all of my notifications when I come across the message about the SF Weekly. It doesn't have a link attached to it, just the message. I go to Safari and do a search on "SF Weekly, award, mendoza" and there it is:

I Am a Ghost gets Best New Horror Director in SF Weekly's Best of 2012! (To which Richard Wong said, "Hmm...it's still May") Click HERE to see the article!

So, in one hour, I won Best Screenplay for Yes, We're Open, Best New Horror Director for I Am a Ghostand Parvesh Cheena called me funny. VC, your festival has got me aflutter.

Thank you to L.A. Renigen who knows the importance of being as generous to the universe from whom you demanded generosity. Thank you to Quentin Lee for the clothes, parties and a surprise second viewing of I Am a Ghost! (Thanks for noticing the projection! Haha!) Thank you to David Kittredge and Rob McClary for the super support and dinner. Thanks to the Yes, We're Open Crew (Rich, Irene, Seng, Parry and Lynn) for coming to the screenings of I Am a Ghost! Thanks to Bao Nguyen, Dave Boyle, Mye Hoang and Goh Nakamura for the unending support that's spanned multiple festivals. And thank you, thank you, thank you to the Kickstarter backers who came out to both screenings in Los Angeles!

Thanks so much to the staff of VC, Abe Ferrer, Dave Magdael and especially Anderson Le of VC, who personally championed I Am a Ghost. I've talked with a bunch of the other filmmakers, and we all agree that we felt really taken care of. (There goes that preposition thing, again.)

And congratulations to all of the winners at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival! Click HERE to read more.

 

H.P.

From San Francisco to Chicago! /  by H.P. Mendoza

What a great experience it was to premiere in San Francisco with THREE sold out screenings. I really do believe the two extra sold out screenings happened because of the generous write-ups of the film, especially the Composable Thumbs review.

We were so happy to see a lot of friends and family show up to the screenings, as well as a lot of the people who pledged on Kickstarter (who I've listed in the previous blog post.) And thank you to all of the filmmakers who came to support the film with such kind words; Dave Boyle, Tanuj Chopra, S. Leo Chiang, Goh Nakamura, Richard Wong, Christopher Hollstein, and Quentin Lee among others. Thank you all for being there!

And now, we move on to other festivals. I Am a Ghost will be playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago as part of the Asian American Showcase on Friday the 13th! Thanks to Tim Hugh for his kindness, warmth and enthusiasm over the film and his clever idea to program the film on a night when people want to get scared. :)

So, on to the second festival of this long journey. Thank you so much, everyone! And remember to spread the word about the film, share it on facebook, and like our page! We couldn't have filled up those theaters without you!

H.P.

First Blog Post! /  by H.P. Mendoza

Thank you to everyone who helped bring I Am a Ghost to life. This film really has been a labor of love and I've definitely felt the love from all of you who have supported the post-production process through Kickstarter. And I may have been aloof, but I want everyone to know that the film is in really good shape. So good that we are an official selection at the 30th Annual San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival! This excites me on two levels: 1) This is where both Colma: The Musical andFruit Fly both premiered as well as the upcoming Yes, We're Open and 2) the film was shot almost entirely in San Francisco!

I can't publish the dates, times or venues until after the press conference on the 9th but let me use this first blog post to say thank you and introduce the first festival trailer for I Am a Ghost! I would also like to thank the following people for supporting on Kickstarter:

Joon Park, Bethany Del Lima, Steve Gonzalez, Malhar Pagay, Bill Ottemann, Robert OGeen, L.A. Renigen, Anh-Thu Nguyen, Priscilla Mendoza, Glenn Auve, Richard Wong, David Lewis, Scott Kildall, Victoria Scott, Jef Cunningham, Tim Bland, Gretchen Addi, Virginia King, Kathryn Aaker, Jeremy De Forge, Kimber O'Neill, Cynthia Leung, Andreas Mugler, Paul Kolsanoff, Allen Gittelson, Robert Lord, Amy Hope Dermont, Rachel Wong, Carol Milano, Mary Foyder, Josh Snyder, Gauri Sharma, Stephen Schwichow, Samantha Eldredge, Mario Anima, Mike Benning, Parry Shen, Rebecca Marshall, Patrick Hagan, Ethan Malasky, Kay Tracy, Eric Wertz, Laura Milano, Jay Alexander, Marc Whinston, Josh Naftel, Darcy Harris, Andy Volk, Stella Kang, Jill Manthei, Tor Ravengael, Evangeline McMillon, Julia Kwan, Robert Fukushima, Sohr Adsuara Picart, Joseph, Tanuj Chopra, Michael Prados, Seng Chen, David Kittredge, Andrew Paik, Jessica Cunningham, James Choi, Stephen Kim, Woo Jin Park, Alicia Terkel, Emily Marcroft, Charles Montague, Beth Scannell, Carolyn Oliss, Steffi Liem, Wynn Nojopranoto, Maria Judice, Beau Trinca, Chris Broderi k, Ellen Park, Chris Walden, Armin Izer, Helen Souranoff, Krista Ravengael, Marilyn Mix, Darcy Villere, Joe Futrelle, Mark Enslin, Hannah Dworkin, Will Luo, Tin Lee, Natalie Mulford, Matzi Hilger, Sean Bart, Esther Arellano, Harlow, Masashi Niwano, Ted McD, Laura Irvine, Ben, Marianna Matthews, Juan Enriquez, Elizabeth Cobb, Liam Dunlop, Ian Carey, Noah Balmer, Brian of Tribute Gallery, Orme Dominique, Mariana Lopez, Michael Kelly, Jazmine Applin, Elisa Stollmeyer, Martin Berthelot, Jim Kosmicki, Paul Prater 

So, until February 9th, enjoy the new trailer! And hit me up however you want to hit me up! But for sure, please join the I Am a Ghost facebook page: 

www.facebook.com/iamaghostfilm

I'll be shipping out the Kickstarter rewards, too, so keep an eye out! 

H.P.