CAAM Vlog from the Flaherty 2010
The 56th Annual Flaherty Film Seminar took place recently in upstate New York June 19-25, 2010. Christine Kwon and Michella Rivera-Gravage had an amazing experience there this year. Check out our video blog!
The 56th Annual Flaherty Film Seminar took place recently in upstate New York June 19-25, 2010. Christine Kwon and Michella Rivera-Gravage had an amazing experience there this year. Check out our video blog!
As part of CHSA’s Second Saturday series of events, July 10th will feature a screening of CARVED IN SILENCE directed by Felicia Lowe. car
Association of Korean Adoptees, San Francisco (AKASF) presents RESILIENCE by Tammy Chu: A Special Community Outreach Event in partnership with the Center for Asian American Media.
3rd i Films presents 3rd i’s Queer Eye, a South Asian lens on the LGBT experience. Featuring the documentary FREDDIE MERCURY: THE UNTOLD STORY.
I got a chance last year to talk with Professor Celine Parennas Shimizu in an interview about a range of topics, from her current research at Stanford to her most recent film, BIRTHRIGHT.
CAAM is proud to announce the national PBS premiere of Christopher Wong’s award-winning documentary WHATEVER IT TAKES on March 30, 2010 on Independent Lens.
The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, presented by CAAM, wrapped with an estimated attendance of over 25,000, including over 200 filmmakers, actors and industry guests. The program featured seven world premieres, one North American premiere and two U.S. premieres of feature-length films.
Hot Docs is now accepting project proposals for the upcoming Toronto Documentary Forum, May 5 & 6, 2010.
3rd i Films is very pleased to present the 3rd i Seventh Annual San Francisco Int’l South Asian Film Festival (SFISAFF) , the premiere showcase for South Asian cinema in the Bay Area, scheduled for November 5 – 8, 2009.
By Vanessa Gentry
If asked to think about folk music and the political activism of the 1960s and 70s, people often come up with names like Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan. In contrast, most people probably haven’t heard of Chris Iijima, probably have never heard his lyrics about the Vietnam War and growing up Asian American in the 1950s and 60s, and probably don’t know that the legendary John Lennon once introduced a performance of his musical-activist duo group, Yellow Pearl, on national television. In the 2009 documentary, A SONG FOR OURSELVES, director/editor Tadashi Nakamura’s traces the life of Iijima through his work as an activist and traveling folk singer in the early 70s, to his teaching career and family life in New York and Hawai’i.
Iijima recounts his early years of activism: joining with others to protest the Vietnam War in groups like Students for a Democratic Society and yet ultimately feeling alone in organizations filled mainly with white students. Claiming to have had “no community growing up in New York,” he admits to “watching war movies with the next-door neighbor, secretly rooting for the other side.” His first sense of belonging, the beginning of what he and his family later called their community, came in 1970 when he joined other Asian American activists in the group Asian Americans for Action. Soon after, he and fellow activist Nobuko Miyamoto actively redefined mainstream perceptions of Asian American identity by writing and performing music with determinedly honest lyrics accompanied by a simple, accessible acoustic folk sound. Backup musician Charlie Chin, who joined Yellow Pearl a year after its conception, voiced his surprise after the first time he heard them perform: “I’d never heard Asians carrying on like this… They refuted what the mainstream was saying about us.”
The sense of connection and community that drew Iijima, Miyamoto, Chin and other Asian Americans together in the 1960s continued to sustain Iijima, even when he changed his career path and started a family. Iijima’s decision to settle down was not a relinquishing of his activism, however; it was an expansion of a viewpoint, a realization that his family life and his activism need not be mutually exclusive. It was the ultimate understanding that family and human connection need not be sacrificed for political change.
A SONG FOR OURSELVES is now available for educational, institutional, library and community group purchase or rental. Special features on the DVD include ‘Farewell Chris: Los Angeles Memorial,’ ‘Mother of the Movement: Kazu Iijima,’ Chris Iijima extended interview and additional photos and music.
By SFIAAFF Director Chi-hui Yang
The annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar has for decades been one of the world’s most important and vital places to explore contemporary documentary and experimental cinema, and its 2009 edition offered no evidence to dispute this.
dGenerate Films is proud to bring you the best of recent independent cinema from mainland China. They’ve curated a selection of the most interesting, honest, and ground-breaking films.