Avant-garde and captivating, this film is a poetic reflection on recorded history and spoken memory, on the writing of history and counterpart: family stories. Rea Tajiri’s family were among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans incarcerated after the Pearl Harbor attack –a fragment of (intra)history obliterated in official audiovisual records.
Festivals
Whitney Museum biennal
Flaherty Film Seminar
Yamagata Festival, Japan
Rea Tajiri is a Japanese American video artist and filmmaker. She was raised in Chicago before leaving home to attend the California Institute of the Arts. After graduating, Tajiri worked as a producer on various film and video projects in Los Angeles and New York, gaining international acclaim for her 1991 film History and Memory: for Akiko and Takashige, which premiered at the 1991 Whitney Biennial In 1993, Tajiri collaborated with Pat Saunders on production of the documentary Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice, about the Nisei Japanese American human rights activist.
Filmography
History and Memory: for Akiko and Takashige (1991)
Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice (1994)