Rea Tajiri

Lordville

Rea Tajiri

LORDVILLE extends director Rea Tajiri's on-going examination of ideas of history, place and race, and continues and propels larger conversations within the documentary field. A work spanning categorizations; it is a landscape film, an experimental documentary, an ethnography of place, a personal meditation.

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige

Rea Tajiri

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. This 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.

Strawberry Fields

Rea Tajiri

Suzy Nakamura, James Sie

After a visit from the ghost of her sister, a rebellious 16 year old Japanese American girl hits the road with her boyfriend in search of a better life. Hooking up with activist friends along the way, she comes to an important realization about her past: that her parents were incarcerated in an internment camp during World War II. She detours her road trip, ditches her boyfriend and drives off into the Arizona desert in a determined search for the truth that will set her free.

Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice

Rea Tajiri, Pat Saunders

Yuri Kochiyama

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.

Little Murders/Obits

Rea Tajiri

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 and wanders the streets in a child's wagon, searching for clues to the cause of his death through his daughter, a homicide detective. When the two finally collide on a downtown street late one night, they are transported to another dimension. The two communicate through dance and music, finally unraveling the cause of their separation and grief.