American Studies, Asian American Studies, Cornell Cinema,
and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies,
present

Strawberry Fields

With director Rea Tajiri
Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts, Ithaca College

Thursday, March 27
7:00 pm
Willard Straight Hall Theatre
followed by a Q&A with the director

Rea Tajiri is an award winning Japanese American filmmaker and video artist. Born in Chicago, she holds a BFA and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Cornell Cinema will be screening Tajiri’s first feature film Strawberry Fields. The film, which premiered at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, was an Official Selection of the Venice International Film Festival and won the Grand Prix at the Fukuoka Asian Film Festival in 1997. Set in the 1970s, Strawberry Fields follows Irene Kawai, a young Japanese American woman struggling with her own identity and the unspoken history of her family’s internment during World War II. Spurred by the ghost of her younger sister and a photograph of a grandfather she never knew, Irene sets off on a road trip, and eventually ends up in Poston, Arizona, site of the internment camp where her family was held. Strawberry Fields received a theatrical release through Phaedra Cinema in 1998.

Tajiri has been a recipient of numerous fellowships, these include the Rockefeller Media Fellowship, the NYFA Artist Fellowship and two NEA Visual Arts Fellowships. In addition, she has received production grants from the New York State Council for the Arts, ITVS, and Art Matters, Inc. Tajiri’s work has been included in two Whitney Biennials and has toured festivals throughout Europe and Asia, including the Berlin, Rotterdam, and Venice Film Festivals, and the Singapore International Film Festival. Her work on video is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Centres Pompidou in Paris.

Among Tajiri’s other films are History and Memory: for Akiko and Takashige, which received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association in 1992, the Special Jury Prize: “New Visions Category” at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1992 and won “Best Experimental Video” at the Atlanta Film and Video Festival in 1992. In 1993 Tajiri made the documentary Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice, which she co-produced with Pat Saunders. She has taught filmmaking at Temple University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and currently teaches at Ithaca College.

Date: Friday, May 4
Time: 7:00pm
Location: Ithaca College Clark Theatre

Date: Saturday, May 5
Time: 7:00pm
Location: Cornell University Statler Auditorium

Admission Fee for both: $5.00

Join the two-hour celebration of Asian and Asian American culture and heritage!

This year, several organizations in the Ithaca city community have partnered up to sponsor a unique theatrical experience in celebration of Asian American Heritage Month!

Date: Thursday, April 26th
Time: 4:30pm
Location: Africana Studies & Research Center, 310 N. Triphammer Rd

Film & discussion: Screening of local film Spilled Soy Milk with writer/director Professor Changhee Chun, Ithaca College

For more info, visit:
http://creationline.org/pages/spillednews.html
Co-sponsored with Ithaca Asian American Association, Ithaca College

4 Films in the Series

April 4 - China Blue
April 11 - The Motel
April 18 - Man Push Cart
April 25 - In Between Days

In conjunction with the Asian American Studies Program and particularly with Assistant Professor Thuy Tu’s “Introduction to Asian American Studies” course, Cornell Cinema is pleased to present four award-winning films exploring themes relevant to what it means to be Asian-American. According to the course description, these major themes include: identity and stereotypes, gender, family, community, education, migration and labor, and anti-Asianism.

From a blue jeans factory in China to a push cart on the streets of Manhattan, from a seedy motel in middle America to the suburban wastelands of Toronto, these films tell the stories of immigrants from China, Korea and Pakistan, insightful portraits that illuminate the struggles faced by strangers in strange lands.

The series begins with the documentary China Blue, which shows what life is like for two teenage girls from the countryside working in a blue jeans factory in Shaxi, China, cranking out denim day and night for global customers “who are forever insisting on lower unit costs and shorter delivery schedules.” (The Nation)

Both Michael Kang’s The Motel and Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart received Best First Feature nominations for Independent Spirit Awards. The Motel tells the coming-of-age story of 13-year-old Ernest Chin who lives with his Chinese-American family in a motel run by his strict mother. The 20-something Korean-American, Sam, a regular at the motel, befriends Ernest and takes him under his wing for better or for worse in this comedy/drama that “perfectly captures the glum desperation of inhabiting the biological limbo of early adolescence.” (NY Times)

Ahmad Razvi received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his performance as Ahmad, a Pakistani immigrant scratching out a living as a push cart vendor in Manhattan, in Man Push Cart. Director Bahrani “immerses the viewer in the ritual and rhythms of Ahmad’s daily existence, solitary and full of drudgery and has said that principal among his many influences is Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. Like Sisyphus, Ahmad seems cruelly trapped yet never gives up. He represents not only hard-pressed Southeast Asian immigrants and their plight but also everyone else eking out a living on the street corners of cities the world over.” (Kevin Thomas, LA Times) This unrelenting portrait is set against the beautifully filmed backdrop of New York City, captured by cinematographer Michael Simmonds, who was also nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.

The series concludes with In Between Days, written, directed and edited by Korean-American So Yong Kim. Drawing from her own experience, Kim tells the story of teenage Aimie, newly immigrated to Canada from Korea, lonely, alienated, and desperate for romance with a boy who only views her as a friend. Visually, the story is narrated largely by alternating external shots of anonymous suburban wastelands with tight close-ups on faces, a “cinematographic paradox; the total simplicity of style and language, a style that shows clearly and in an exemplary way the big complexity of the sentiments and the sensations of all the immigrated people.” (Gabriele Barrera)

For more information, please visit: http://www-cinema.slife.cornell.edu/series_latespring07/asianamerican.html