Changing Season: On the Masumoto Family Farm director Jim Choi wins the Best Director for a Documentary Film Award at the 2015 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, it was announced last Friday.
“We were all taken by surprise as to where and how this film unfolded—the depth and surprising issues it brought up without feeling forced or manipulated. The director handled the subjects unobtrusively and let the stories honestly flow from them, capturing moments that we didn’t expect,” documentary jury members Abby David (Preferred Content), Brian Knappenberger (documentary director) and Tamlyn Tomita (actress) said in a statement about Changing Season.
“Changing Season: On the Masumoto Family Farm chronicles a transitional year-in-the-life of famed farmer, slow food advocate, and sansei, David “Mas” Masumoto, and his compelling relationship with daughter Nikiko, who returns to the family farm with the intention of stepping into her father’s work boots. Mas’ hopes and hesitations for the future are shored up with his daughter’s return, as the family must navigate the implications of Mas’ 60th birthday and triple bypass surgery. The film is interspliced with moments of Nikiko’s razor sharp meditations on her family’s internment during WWII and her role as a queer, progressive farmer in the Central Valley,” according to Sierra Lee.
The film is a co-production of CAAM with Director Jim Choi with major funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Changing Season premiered at CAAMFest 2015 in March.
Choi emigrated to the Washington D.C. area as a child and considers himself a 1.5 generation Korean American. Choi is an alumnus of the Rhode Island School of Design and is one of the founding curators of APAture, the first multidisciplinary Asian American arts exposition. Choi’s most recent directorial credit is Don’t Lose Your Soul, an intimate profile of Anthony Brown and Mark Izu ,the founders of the Asian American Jazz Festival. A selection of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, it aired on KQED in San Francisco and was offered nationally on public television. He served as the Director of Photography on the IFP Gotham Audience Award winning Jake Shimabukuro: Life On Four Strings. His work on Lost and Found: Legacy of USS Lagarto garnered an Emmy nomination in the cinematography category.
