"Hold the Sun goes where too few filmmakers these days dare to go. The directors fearlessly tackle the everyday ho-hum. If you like fast cutting actions flicks, this pic isn’t for you. Instead, the film holds you and allows you to feel the way the light changes, and how body language and daily rituals really look."

- Erica Marcus, San Francisco Bay Times

"Laura Zaylea and David Yun revive San Francisco's legendary experimental film movement with an all-female meditation on art and loneliness. Warning: this piece's eccentric structure may take a bit of getting used to, but viewers will soon respond to the hypnotic spell of a multi-character story-line."

- David Lamble, Bay Area Reporter

"Hold the Sun is so Mission District (be assured this is strictly complimentary), replete with quiescent all-female cycling sequences, hipster aesthetics, recognizable locations, and, of course, counterculture queers- in this case all women. This is a reticent film that reflects a thoroughly urban, inspired solitude. Its characters are not all cohorts but are individuals who carry out their endeavors separately....Because these characters aren’t configured into a conventional narrative, the pleasure arises from getting a sense of their milieu and their psychology as they navigate it."

-Kevin Langson, Edge San Francisco

"Hold the Sun’s exceptional cinematography, moments of magical realism, production design and sophisticated score – by local husband and wife musician team Jeannette Faith and Wes Steed – demonstrate the filmmakers’ promise."

- Lori Higa, Portero View

"With a stunningly subdued palate, an experimental mix of magic and realism, and a bold exploration of performance, HOLD THE SUN successfully ruptures our expectations of bustling urban life by luxuriating in the ubiquitous silence—and the ordinary magic—that exists amongst us."

—Geraldine Ah-Sue, Center for Asian American Media (CAAM)

"Born and raised in suburban California, I couldn't help but identify with David Yun's A Taste of Home. The seven-minute video chronicles the artist's return to his childhood home of Livonia, Michigan, made after his mother becomes terminally ill. Yun's voice narrates his return to this small, overwhelmingly white, suburban town. When his mother says, 'Welcome home,' he replies, 'This hasn't been home in years.' In college on the East Coast, he told people he was from Detroit, even though Livonia is nothing like Detroit. Livonia is just so unpleasant to say, he explains.

His monologue plays over images of a Midwestern nowhere — American flags blowing beside busy streets, leaves in a parking lot, an open sky gridded with power lines, cars passing on a night highway. Supposed place-markers, the store signs and municipal buildings provide no orientation. We could be anywhere; we could be nowhere. The film ends with a realization of sorts, as Yun speaks to his mother's memory. 'My home is you, me, Michelle, Chris, Dad,' he says. 'Now you are gone, I'm homeless.'

Yun's work provides the show's closest thing to a resolution: home is not composed of geographic coordinates, but of memories and relationships."

—Victoria Gannon, "Art Review: Insider/Outsider", KQED.com

"Highlights include David Yun's riveting and surprisingly heartfelt work, 'A Taste of Home,'...(t)he video's desolate imagery of empty shopping mall parking lots and battered neon signs provides a stark backdrop for his emotionally charged story. As Yun wearily recounts the struggle of growing up gay and his challenge to reconnect as a caregiver to his ailing mother, the homogeneous scenes of a vapid suburbia supply another layer of pathos. All of this adds up to a chilling work in which familial and cultural misunderstandings result from failed communication."

—Chris Buckner, "Video Killed the Portrait Artist," Metro Pulse

"When David Yun went home to care for his terminally ill mother, he found himself as disconnected and alienated from his small hometown as he had always been. Clip from Yun's seven and a half minute video. Beautiful footage and a voice-over that never becomes too precious or pretentious."

—Brittany Shoot, DV Blog

"'Insider/Outsider' might be one of this year's best group shows. Its 16 artists range from veterans to new voices: David Yun's 2007 video A Taste of Home is one of a few works in which he takes on the whiteness of suburban Detroit..."

—Johnny Ray Huston, "Our Picks of the Week", San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Many of the films shown in this year's festival deal with the filmmaker's personal experiences. David Yun, director of the short documentary 'A Taste of Home,' relied almost entirely on personal experiences for inspiration for his film about his relationships with his dying mother and his hometown, '(It's) sort of half eulogy to my mom and half sort of open-letter, trying to say things that I never got to say to her,' he said. Yun believes personal experiences are the basis of his work. 'I feel like my own personal experiences are the only position of authority I have...the only experience I can speak from with any sort of conviction,' he said."

—Kathleen Keish, "Film Festival Hits Town Friday", Athens Messenger

"David Yun carries on the tradition of the experimental 'scratch film' in the age of digital artifact, in one minute video works that turn discrete gestures into intense moments of emotional, warped nostalgia."

—Scott Kiernan, Micaëla Gallery

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