Film Screening of 'PILGRIMAGE: Making our History Relevant to Our Current Experience' Guest Speaker & Filmmaker: Tadashi Nakamura
Department: Asian American Studies
Date and Time: October 27, 2014 | 10:30 AM-12:00 PMEvent Location: ICS 209
Event Details
The UC Irvine Departments of Asian American Studies and Film & Media Studies Present:
PILGRIMAGE: Making our History Relevant to Our Current Experience
Guest Speaker & Filmmaker:
Tadashi Nakamura
Monday, October 27
ICS 209
10:30 -11:50am
Free and open to the public. Limited seating available.
Tadashi Nakamura was named one of CNN’s “Young People Who Rock” for being the youngest filmmaker at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival as well as one of the “30 Most Influential Asian Americans Under 30” by the popular website Angry Asian Man. The fourth generation Japanese American recently completed his first full-length documentary Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings on internationally acclaimed ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro. The film went on to win the 2013 Gotham Independent Film Audience Award, beating out 12 Years a Slave and Fruitvale Station.
Nakamura’s trilogy of documentary films on the Japanese American experience, Yellow Brotherhood (2003), Pilgrimage (2007) and A Song for Ourselves (2009) have garnered over 20 awards at film festivals around the world. Nakamura has a M.A. in Social Documentation from UC Santa Cruz, a B.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA where he graduated Summa Cum Laude.
Tadashi Nakamura will be screening ‘Pilgrimage’ (29 minutes) in ‘Asian American Documentary Practices’ ASIANAM 114 / FLM&MDA 130.
PILGRIMAGE tells the inspiring story of how an abandoned WWII concentration camp for Japanese Americans has been transformed into a symbol of retrospection and solidarity for people of all ages, races and nationalities in our post 9/11 world. With a hip music track, never-before-seen archival footage and a story-telling style that features young and old, PILGRIMAGE reveals how the Japanese American community reclaimed a national experience that had almost been deleted from public understanding. PILGRIMAGE shows how the annual Manzanar Pilgrimage now has new meaning for diverse generations who realize that when the US government herded thousands of innocent Americans into what the government itself called concentration camps, it was failure of democracy that would affect all Americans.