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Check out this article in the print edition of StudentFilmmakers Magazine, November 2006. More behind-the-scenes photos in the print version. Click here to get a copy and to subscribe >>

Ben Wu Discusses Shooting Docs On DV
Cross Your Eyes Keep Them Wide

Ben Wu, whose short films have screened at various film festivals and earned honors, including a Silver Medal in the documentary category at the Student Academy Awards (2005), Best Documentary at the Angelus Awards Student Film Festival (2005), and Second Place, Best Student Documentary Short at the Palm Springs International Festival for Short Films (2005), recently completed Cross Your Eyes Keep Them Wide for his Masters thesis project at Stanford University. The documentary screened at the 2006 Telluride Film Festival.

What is Cross Your Eyes Keep Them Wide about?

Ben Wu: Cross Your Eyes is a short documentary about the artists that work at a non-profit art center in San Francisco for people with developmental disabilities.

Behind the scenes of Cross Your Eyes Keep Them Wide. Ben shoots. Photo by Nick Davla.

What inspired the beginnings of this project?

Ben Wu: Throughout my life I never really had much contact or interaction with anyone with developmental disabilities. And I think sometimes relatively naturally there is that fear of the unknown. So there was this slight uncomfortableness for me when I did encounter people with retardation, or autism. I didn’t know how to act, how to approach them. But that always bothered me.

So when a friend mentioned she had been to this amazing place where people with developmental disabilities created amazing artwork, I was fascinated, and maybe a bit intimidated. It was a place I felt like I had to check out, not just to see this artwork I had heard so much about, but also to really get a chance to meet people and challenge my own preconceived notions of individuals with developmental disabilities.

What is the meaning behind the title of the film?

Ben Wu: The title of the film came about towards the end of editing. I was really struggling with a title; everything I came up with previously didn’t seem to capture the spirit of the film. They were cheesy, too sentimental, or would address the disability angle, or the art, but not both. So I was taking a bit of a break from editing and looking at some outtakes from a moment when the crew and I were hanging around with one of the artists. Her name was Camille, and she is very smart but also has some mental problems, so she’ll say these things that initially seem a bit out there, maybe even unhinged, but when you think about them later they seem almost poetic, with a certain degree of perception you wouldn’t have thought possible at the time. Anyway, she loved to have her picture taken, and we were all taking pictures with her, and whenever we’d be posing she’d tell you to, “Cross your eyes! And keep them wide! Keep ‘em wide! Ok, good.” And I thought, that sounds like a great title… It’s a bit odd, quirky, but also very telling about perception and perspective, about looking at things a bit differently. It’s about the way some of the artists view the world, and maybe something we can learn from them. I thought it captured the spirit of the film perfectly, and I liked that it was organic, coming from what one of the artists says, and not me.

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