Rea Tajiri

Rea Tajiri is an award-winning film and videomaker. According to Jeff Clark's review of the film,
History and Memory, "Tajiri's exploration of this subject - sprung from a recollected image of her
mother filling a canteen in a desert landscape - is the most personal"1 of the other works that depicts
the Japanese American "relocation" during World War II. Clark further states that "she imaginatively
retrieves and ponders her mother's relocation and her father's loss of his home."

In History and Memory the viewer hears Rea Tajiri narrate her family's history during the time that
all people of Japanese ancestry were interned. She say's that she is in "search for an ever absent
image and a desire to create an image when there are so few." Her family does not have many
photographs or other objects that would serve as a rememberance of that time. All that her mother
remembers about that time was "why she forgot to remember." Rea Tajiri made this firm because
she was"searching for a history, my own history," because she knew that the story that she had
heard was not true and that parts had been left out.

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, received a Distinguished Achievement Award from
the International Documentary Association in1992, and premiered at the Whitney Biennial in 1991.
With collaborator Pat Saunders, she recently co-produced and co-directed an hour long documentary
entitled Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice. Her works have been screened internationally at the
Rotterdam Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the New York Film Festival and the Yamagat
International Documentary Film Festival, among others. In 1992, Tajiri receive a Rockefeller
Foundation Fellowship and an ITVS Production Grant for her dramatic feature project, Strawberry
Fields.

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige
A film by Rea Tajiri, 1991, 32 min., Color/BW
Groundbreaking and haunting, this film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s family was among th...

Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice
A film by Pat Saunders and Rea Tajiri, 1994, 57 min., Color
Yuri Kochiyama is a Japanese American woman who has lived in Harlem for more than 40 years with a long history of activism on a wide range of issues. ...