Renee Tajima-Peña

MANZANAR, DUPONT GUY AND SEWING WOMAN

TRT: 65mins

The three pioneering Asian American documentaries continue too impact audiences and filmmakers. MANZANAR was the first documenrtary to address the Japanese American internment; DUPONT GUY is a radical statement on the internal identity conflicts of Chinatown, and SEWING WOMAN is a portrait of the filmmaker's immigrant mother and her remarkable resilience.

In person: Directors Robert Nakamura and Curtis Choy, and guest programmer/filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña

		MANZANAR USA 1971 | 16mins | 16mm Color DDIRECTOR: Robert Nakamura
I was an angry teenager when I first saw MANZANAR at a community center during the mid-70s. It was a revelation. This was a time when students were so hungry to learn our heritage, we'd mimeograph anything we could scrounge up about the camps, the railroad workers, the manong, and teach each other. I never imagined we could make our own films about our own history. And MANZANAR, like Nakamura's subsequent films, was shot with such a distinctly Japanese American aesthetic—it raised what I had understood to be the solitary and the familiar to the level of art. —RTP
		DUPONT GUY - THE SCHIZ OF GRANT AVENUE USA 1976 | 35mins | 16mm Color/B&W DIRECTOR: Curtis Choy
I haven't seen DUPONT GUY in years, but like Curtis's other films, and the filmmaker himself, it is unforgettable. In 1976 when DUPONT GUY was made, rap as we popularly know it was percolating in the Bronx and Brooklyn. At the same time, on Asian America's left coast, Curtis and GT Wong were articulating the lingua franca of Grant Avenue, Canal Street, Crenshaw. If any of us others ever felt like whores to the masters of funding, festivals and TV programmers, Curtis stands apart. Like painter Mine Okubo or poet Al Robles, his clarity of vision will weather the test of time. —RTP
		SEWING WOMAN USA 1982 | 14mins | 16mm B&W DIRECTOR: Arthur Dong
SEWING WOMAN is a quiet, exquisite film that produced a frisson of excitement when it was made. Arthur constructed the narrative of his mother's life through a semi-documentary, semi-fictional monologue. Using everyday images—home movies, family photos, Mrs. Dong sewing bolts of cloth on her workhorse Singer—Arthur created a lyrical film essay that is at once economical and emotionally loaded. For those of us who grew up thinking our families had no place in the pantheon of American myth-making, SEWING WOMAN was an awakening. —RTP

MANZANAR, DUPONT GUY and SEWING WOMAN are distributed by NAATA.