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The Carsey-Wolf Center is honored to welcome filmmaker Rea Tajiri for a one-night retrospective of her work on ancestral time and the Japanese American experience. The event will open with History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991), Tajiri’s experimental mediation on her family’s forced incarceration during the Second World War. While “there are things in the world we have images for,” other things, as she reminds us, are beholden to the limits of collective memory and the spirits of the dead. Poetically driven by her family’s disjointed recollections of their own imprisonment, Tajiri’s film interweaves an array of memorabilia, interviews, and intergenerational pilgrimage to visually conjure and reimagine what has been stolen and what has been lost.
Released over thirty years later, Wisdom Gone Wild (2022) follows Tajiri’s mother Rose, and her gradual descent into the dream logic of dementia. Tajiri bears witness as Rose collapses past and present and transforms into a time traveler, connecting mother and daughter to both their ancestral lineage and each other in revelatory ways. Made over the course of sixteen years, Wisdom Gone Wild is a radically intimate cine-poem that poignantly reflects on the transformative possibilities of aging, care, and collaborative remembrance.
Following our screening of History and Memory and Wisdom Gone Wild, filmmaker Rea Tajiri will join moderator Kelsey Moore (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a discussion of her films.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center, the Center for Feminist Futures, and the Department of Asian American Studies.
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