JEFF KAO | FILM PRODUCTION/DIRECTION/EDITING
Evershift Production features the work of Oakland filmmaker Jeff Kao.
"One of my main inspirations in making movies is to recapture the sensation, felt as a child, in seeing or experiencing something for the first time in my life.
It is through these instances that we built our memory banks. And it is through these clusters of memories that we view each new thing that happens to us in life.
For most of my life, I’ve felt inexperienced. It always seemed that others around me somehow knew how to behave socially, and that somehow I missed out on the training. My early childhood was spent in a cozy, intimate world inhabited primarily by my sister and mother. It was quiet and calm and felt cloistered. When I started elementary school, it felt as if other children had lived through this already. I wanted to fit in and so I very carefully observed how other children acted. I think it is this early intense curiosity about the way people relate to each other that most informs my films. The distance between people and how each of us deals with the resulting vertigo fascinates me and seems mirrored directly in the relationship between filmmaker and audience. What meant everything to me, could mean nothing to you, but it could mean something."
After pursuing a career as a fine artist for over twenty years, Jeff turned to motion pictures to better express his thoughts, emotions, and visions. While studying painting as an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the 1980s, he minored in film and became dedicated to the highly technical processes involved in 16mm film production and post-production. This technical side of film-making was a good fit for Kao’s pre-disposition for craft, but it was the time-based aspect of film that sealed the transition for him, allowing him to channel his creativity more directly into linear, narrative story-telling.
