Histories: An Evening with Rea Tajiri

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Location(s)

Prince Music Theater / Independence Black box
1412 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA, 19102
See map: Google Maps

Presented in partnership with the Asian Arts Initiative and PIFVA

(Bridge) River is Remembering (2009, 10 min, work in progress) a film by Rea Tajiri
In this new work, a meditation on landscape as history, Tajiri explores the ways in which landscape, memory and history reverberate in Lordville, a small New York Delaware river town. Eschewing the popular historical narratives and meditating on a quote from Toni Morrison (“…all water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was…”) Tajiri sets out along the floodpath of the Delaware which nearly destroyed the town in 2006, in an attempt to recover the undocumented history of this forgotten village. What was the river trying to remember?

Strawberry Fields (1998, 86 min) a film by Rea Tajiri
Set in 1971, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, "Strawberry Fields," tackles the minefield between cultural history and personal memory. After a visitation 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. (will show excepts)


Little Murders (1998, 20 min) a film by Rea Tajiri
A darkly comic musical about the mystery of death, communication of spirits, and the redemption that comes from knowing the truth. 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.

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991, 32 min) a film by Rea Tajiri
Groundbreaking and haunting, 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. The film draws from a variety of sources: Hollywood spectacle, government propaganda, newsreels, memories of the living, and sprits of the dead, as well as Tajiri’s own intuitions of a place she has never visited, but of which she has a memory.

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Rea Tajiri is a film and video artist who earned her BFA and MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in post-studio art. Tajiri’s films explore the psycho-spiritual repercussions of political histories within families. Currently, she is a Professor in the Film Media Arts Department at Temple University and is completing post-production on a new experimental documentary short; Bridge. In this new work, Tajiri explores the ways in which landscape, memory and history reverberate amongst the inhabitants of a small New York town on the Delaware River. http://www.reatajiri.com/

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Producers’ Forums are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Independence Foundation