CSUMB's graduating Teledramatic Arts and Technology Students show off in film and theater productions.

Photo by Randy Tunnell: Phat TAT: Teledramatic Arts and Technology graduate Alison Clifford has taken her CSUMB classroom instruction in filmmaking and moved to the next level.

Alison Clifford''s short film, Gender Equality, is, well, short. It''s only about two minutes long, and when I pop it into my VCR, I discover something else: it''s in Japanese. Clifford, who made the film after graduating from CSU Monterey Bay''s Teledramatic Arts and Technology Department (TAT) last year, has already shown it at film festivals both national and international. But as I watch, although the spoof is apparent (a frustrated housewife spraying her lazy, Goldfish-cracker-eating husband with "Gender Equality" spray and turning him into a dish-scrubbing fool), the Japanese voiceover is a bit obtuse. I figure it''s a parody of poorly dubbed foreign films, on top of the obvious mocking of culture and infomercials. I''m underwhelmed.

But when I meet Clifford, I''m impressed by the resumé she''s built in the short time since she''s graduated, including a stint as a KAZU radio programmer and work with other films. She tells me that Gender Equality is the only film made by a TAT graduate that''s been shown in so many film festivals.

Clifford is now mentoring several of this year''s graduating CSUMB students and helping with their final projects, known as Capstones. She''s also just been accepted to the University College Dublin Film School. That''s Dublin, Ireland. Clearly, I''m missing something. I ask her why she chose to do a film in Japanese. She pauses.

"It was in Japanese?" she asks, staring at me.

"Well, yes," I answer. "Although the only word I recognized was arigato."

"It was in Japanese," she repeats. I''m starting to get irritated. Then Clifford laughs. "I gave you the wrong tape," she explains. "My roommate is a Japanese language student and borrowed the tape to practice dubbing."

So I try again with a different film that Clifford''s worked on, and watch a copy of Native Tongue, one of this year''s Capstone projects written and directed by graduating TAT student Christopher Johnson. Clifford served as assistant director.

The film is in a noir style, filmed in black-and-white on Super 16. There''s a lot of Spanish spoken in it, but this is intentional.

In the story, an alcoholic writer named Jared falls for a Cuban call-girl who speaks only Spanish. But via subtitles, her supposed words of love, incomprehensible to her lover, are revealed to the viewer as cynical comments on what a sucker Jared is.

"It was something that developed from a script that really sucked," Johnson says. "That pretty much proved to me that the whole revision process is absolutely essential to any film-the script didn''t take on the lean quality that it is today until I edited."

All films have been edited down to 20-minute segments for the Capstone festival. Some of the seniors will be giving short presentations on their theater productions. According to TAT teachers Caitlin Manning and Steven Levinson, the goal is nothing less than to achieve genius.

"We expect the Capstones to be worthy of mass market distribution," Levinson says. "This is not a class project. This is a piece they are putting a hell of a lot of effort into."

The CSUMB capstones will be presented on Thursday and Friday (5/22 and 23) throughout campus. The TAT Capstones will be presented Thursday from 1-4pm, and from 7-11pm, and on Friday from 7-11pm, at the World Theater, Sixth Avenue, Seaside.