Directed by Kimi Takesue • 2016 • United States
Filmmaker Kimi Takesue finds an unlikely collaborator while visiting her grandfather Tom in Hawai’i. A recent widower in his nineties, Tom seems content to go about his daily routines until he shows surprising interest in his granddaughter’s stalled romantic screenplay. In alternately funny and poignant discussions, Kimi’s fictional love story—and Tom’s creative revisions—serve as a vehicle for his past memories of love and loss to surface. Shot over six years, this intimate meditation on family and absence expands the vernacular of the home movie to consider how history is accumulated in the everyday and how sparks of humor and creativity can animate an ordinary life.
Up Next in First-Person Asian American: 11 Documentaries
-
No Data Plan
Directed by Miko Revereza • 2019 • United States
Having lived as an undocumented person in the United States for over twenty years, Filipino American filmmaker Miko Revereza sets out on a three day journey by train from Los Angeles to New York—an anxious odyssey through a succession of transit z...
-
Wisdom Gone Wild
Directed by Rea Tajiri • 2022 • United States
Starring Rose Noda, Rea TajiriIn this moving and original reflection on mortality and transformation, Rea Tajiri partners with her mother, Rose Tajiri Noda, to create a film about the final sixteen years of her life as a person living with dementia...
