Othello Khanh [p.2]

In 1962, she formed a design company with another former model, Christiane Bailly. They called the company Emma Christie. The two were major figures in the pret-a-porter movement.

Emmanuelle created a line called Youthquake in the 1960s and went on designing for other labels like Missoni. She also popularized large thick-rimmed sunglasses while she was in the fashionista scene and later designed mod glass frames.

Othello's parents divorced. Quasar now lives in Viet Nam with his second wife and still works as an engineer and designer of modern furniture and other innovations.

From a young age, Othello was exposed to art, design, fashion and intellectual thinking. Growing up in Parisian fashion houses in the 1960s made for an eclectic upbringing. His creative parents paved the way for his future in the arts.

Just One of the Vatos
As a student, Othello studied film and architecture. He had a stint as a publicist in Paris for years. He eventually went back to school to study film and paid his dues on the road to becoming a filmmaker.

"I had a lot of jobs. I was a runner, a cameraman, an assistant director, music video producer, I did it all," Othello says of his early days.

There are events in an artist's life that crystallize his vision for the future. Such an event occurred in 1989, in the days leading up to and following the Romanian revolution. This was the first time Othello saw a revolution actually happening on television.

"The dictator was on the balcony, waving his arms up. And the people below him were waving their hands back," says Othello.

The visceral images on the news struck a cord with Othello. He saw rioting citizens take to the streets and eventually overthrow the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. He spent the Christmas of 1989 collecting and combing through news footage to make a parody of the revolution with film and music. This was the turning point for Othello as a filmmaker.

He knew then that someday he would make meaningful projects that reflected social movements.

In 1993, Othello went to visit friends in Mexico and had the idea to shoot a documentary in the Chiapas area. What started off as a three-month working vacation resulted in two and a half years of research and footage.

Shortly after his arrival in southern Mexico, Zapatista guerrillas had taken over the colonial town of San Cristobal de Las Casas on January 1, 1994. Some two thousand masked, armed, and defiant indigenous men and women stormed the balcony of City Hall and protested the federal government's political agenda.

At the time, the North American Federal Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was being introduced. President Clinton was in office and pushing the trade agreement aggressively. The Zapatista rebels' position was that free trade would cause more loss of land and freedom to the indigenous people of the area.

Mexican President Carlos Salinas had declared to his people that Mexicans were entering the first world and would no longer be a third world country. The Zapatistas wanted to send a message to the government to remind them of the humanitarian and land rights of the indigenous people.

Othello was fascinated by the conviction of the Zapatista rebels. He went into the mountains to meet with the guerilla forces and interviewed Indian peasants who spoke of their struggle to reclaim their land.