In this moving and original reflection on mortality and transformation, Rea Tajiri partners with her mother, Rose Tajiri Noda, to create a film about the final sixteen years of her life as a person living with dementia. Tajiri shows us how to enter the world of a person living with dementia in order to connect through listening, art, and music. Rose performs songs from her era providing the soundtrack for time travel as we witness her evolution across nine decades of living. A delicate weave between past and present, parenting and being parented, the film reflects on the reliability of memory and the desire to reinvent one's own life when memories fail us. It is a poignant meditation on mothers and daughters and the abiding strength of the unique relationship between them.
Blackstar 2022: World Premier, Sat, August 6th @ 3pm
Tickets for In-Person & Online Screening
Rea Tajiri, partners with her mother Rose Noda to create a film about entering the world of a person living with dementia in order to maintain relationship and connection through listening, art, and song.
A serial essay for this project & other writing, can be found at
http://www.citiesofrefuge.info/apparitions-of-the-non-alien-philadelphia/
Description:
A collage across time and space, WATARIDORI: birds of passage is a multisite installation that activates real and speculative histories of the Japanese Americans who arrived in Philadelphia from US concentration camps during World War II. To learn more about (ex)CHANGE see: https://www.asianarts25.org/rea-tajiri
A 9 minute documentation of the 4 site installation in Philadelphia, 2018. Commissioned for the 25th Anniversary of Asian Arts Initiative
As a 67:00 hybrid documentary by filmmaker Rea Tajiri. "Through anecdotes from residents, an environmental scientist and a Native American genealogist, LORDVILLE reins in stories of the everyday — powerful floods, ancestral secrets and colonial violence — to probe the material and immaterial traces of a town’s history. This compels us into an act of listening and sensing that orients us toward the land that we have settled our being upon."
- Anita Chang
lordville.tumblr.com
Upcoming Screenings for LORDVILLE: Pacific Arts Movement, San Diego Asian Film Festival
Nov 12, 2014, Ultra Star Mission Valley
festival.sdaff.org/2014/films/lordville/
LORDVILLE screened in the Documentary Competition at CAAM FEST 2014
Saturday March 15, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVES, Berkeley CA, @4:45pm
Sunday March 16, SUNDANCE KABUKI THEATER, San Francisco @ 7pm
caamfest.com/2014/films/lordville/
Visit our Tumblr: lordville.tumblr.com
LORDVILLE is a 67:00 hybrid documentary by filmmaker Rea Tajiri. "Through anecdotes from residents, an environmental scientist and a Native American genealogist, LORDVILLE reins in stories of the everyday — powerful floods, ancestral secrets and colonial violence — to probe the material and immaterial traces of a town’s history. This compels us into an act of listening and sensing that orients us toward the land that we have settled our being upon."
- Anita Chang
lordville.tumblr.com
Upcoming Screenings for LORDVILLE: Pacific Arts Movement, San Diego Asian Film Festival
Nov 12, 2014, Ultra Star Mission Valley
festival.sdaff.org/2014/films/lordville/
LORDVILLE screened in the Documentary Competition at CAAM FEST 2014
Saturday March 15, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVES, Berkeley CA, @4:45pm
Sunday March 16, SUNDANCE KABUKI THEATER, San Francisco @ 7pm
caamfest.com/2014/films/lordville/
Visit our Tumblr: lordville.tumblr.com
Little Murders (USA, 1998, 20 min)
A darkly comic musical about the mystery of death, communication of spirits, and the redemption that comes from knowing the truth. A violent father returns to earth as a ghost and wanders the streets searching for clues to the cause of his death through his daughter, an L.A.P.D. homicide detective.
Available to view on the Criterion Channel
Memories of a Vibrant Moment in Asian American Cinema
Amid the political turbulence and heady counterculture of the early 1970’s, Vietnam-era America, Irene (Suzy Nakamura), a rebellious sixteen-year-old Japanese American girl, leaves home and takes off on a road trip, heading west with her boyfriend and a pair of political activists. Her journey takes her on an unexpected detour of self-discovery, however, when she decides to visit the detention camp where her parents were incarcerated decades earlier. Drawing on her own family’s history, director Rea Tajiri fashions a profoundly cathartic look at the ways in which the trauma of America’s past echo into the present.
(Criterion Channel)
My Signt Is Lined with Visions
Strawberry Fields – 1997; 35mm, dramatic feature film –Official Selection Venice Film Festival 1997,Grand Prix, Fukuoka Asian Film Festival; Seattle International Film Festival; Los Angeles International Film Festival; Independence Night, IFP Screening at the Walter Reade Theater; Chicago Asian American Showcase; Santa Barbara Intenational Film Festival; Houston International Film Festival; theatrical release through Phaedra Cinema, was available on Netflix. Funded through ITVS Open Call, Rockefeller Foundation, NEA Production Grant, NATTA Finishing Funds, New York State Council for the Arts, and Art Matters, Inc. Additional completion funds raised through Private Equity Funding
Heather Yoshimura as Terry
History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991, 32 min) a film by Rea Tajiri
Screening on the Criterion Channel
https://pacarts.org/blog/apahm-filmmaker-spotlight-rea-tajiri/
https://www.sfu.ca/~lmarks/downloads/files/Deleuze%20hybrid%20cinema.pdf
Note: This is a five minute excerpt from the 32:00 piece
History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige
1991, 32 minutes, Color/BW, Beta SP Master
Directed, Edited, Written by Rea Tajiri
Women Make Movies, Electronic Arts Intermix, Video Data Bank
Groundbreaking and haunting, this film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And like so many who were in the camps, Tajiri’s family wrapped their memories of that experience in a shroud of silence and forgetting. Ruminating on the difficult nature of representing the past – especially a past that exists outside traditional historic accounts – Tajiri blends interviews, memorabilia, a pilgrimage to the camp where her mother was interned, and the story of her father, who had been drafted pre-Pearl Harbor and returned to find his family’s house removed from its site. Throughout, she surveys the impact of images (real images, desired images made real, and unrealized dream images). The film draws from a variety of sources: Hollywood spectacle, government propaganda, newsreels, memories of the living, and sprits of the dead, as well as Tajiri’s own intuitions of a place she has never visited, but of which she has a memory. More than simply calling attention to the gaps in the story of the Japanese American internment, this important film raises questions about collective history – questions that prompt Tajiri to daringly re-imagine and re-create what has been stolen and what has been lost.
Awards:
Special Jury Prize, New Visions, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1991;Distinguished Achievement Award, International Documentary Association, 1991;Best Experimental Video: Atlanta Film and Video Festival, 1992; Selection: Whitney Biennial, 1991
Yuri Kochiyama was a Japanese American woman who lived in Harlem for more than 40 years and had a long history of activism on a wide range of issues. Through extensive interviews with family and friends, archival footage, music and photographs, YURI KOCHIYAMA chronicles this remarkable woman’s contribution to social change through some of the most significant events of the 20th century, including the Black Liberation movement, the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, and the Japanese American Redress movement. In an era of divided communities and racial conflict, Kochiyama offered an outstanding example of an equitable and compassionate multiculturalist vision.
Distributed by Women Make Movies
