Bambi Meets Godzilla (バンビ、ゴジラに会う, 1969)

I cannot hear the lyrical melody of Rossini’s Ranz des Vaches (Call to the Dairy Cows) from William Tell (1829) without bursting into a fit of giggles.  This affliction dates back to my early childhood.  My parents were elementary school teachers in London, Ontario.  In those days, educational films were distributed to schools via a 16mm film library held by the London Board of Education.  For my birthday party one year – I believe I was turning 9 or 10 years old – my parents brought a projector home with a collection of animated shorts for my friends and me to watch.  The only film that I recall from the party is Marv Newland’s classic Bambi Meets Godzilla (バンビ、ゴジラに会う, 1969).  If you have not yet seen it, it only lasts about a minute and a half and can be viewed on Vimeo.

The film was made while Newland was still a student in California – he talks about it a little bit in an Anifest interview here – and quickly became a cult classic.  In today’s world in which the internet is patrolled by over-zealous corporations protecting their copyrights and infringing upon freedom of artistic expression, it is doubtful that such a film could be made without the threat of a lawsuit.  Newman did not ask Disney or Toho for permission for his send-up of / homage to their iconic Bambi and Godzilla characters. 

The main conceit of the film is that more than half of the less than two-minute film is taken up by hilarious opening credits and closing acknowledgements.  This is partly a commentary on the growing length of film credits (in the early days, films only credited key people, but by the 1960s the opening and closing credits were getting longer), but it is mainly a suspense technique leading up to the extremely quick “action” of the film.  The opening credits are drawn out for 50 seconds, eliciting chuckles from the audience first when they notice that Marv Newman has done everything, and second when the jobs credited become ludicrous. 

At the 50 second mark, the credits are interrupted by the sudden appearance of Godzilla’s foot flattening poor, unsuspecting Bambi like a pancake.  The “action” lasts just under 2 seconds, then after a few beats for the audience to get over their shock / laughter, the acknowledgements appear, thanking the city of Tokyo for the loan of their most infamous Kaiju.  While watching the film online recently, I got nostalgic for the old 16mm projectors because at my birthday party, in addition to re-watching the film several times, we also watched it backwards and laughed ourselves silly at the sight of Godzilla’s foot going up off-screen and Bambi popping back to life again.  Alas, such joys are not to be had with digital media.  I also miss the whir of the projector and the tactile pleasures of spooling the film into the projector.  It is sad that movie projectors are going the way of the dodo bird, for they bring much pleasure to many.

Marv Newland (マーヴ・ニューランド) is an American-Canadian filmmaker, who has had a long career making short commercials for both private and public broadcasters in the US and Canada.   In the course of his career he has done everything from drawing storyboards for Barbapapa at Toonder Studios (Netherlands) to making delightful animated shorts for the NFB.  His animated adaptation of Gary Larson’s Tales from the Far Side (1994) for TV won him the Grand Prix at Annecy in 1995.  He currently teaches Classical Animation at the Vancouver Film School.  A limited edition DVD of his collected works, The Best of International Rocketship became available earlier this year.  See Cartoon Brew for more info.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

The 4th Annual Tokyo Food Lovers Film Festival (第4回東京ごはん映画祭)

A festival that brings together “delicious films” and “delicious food”.

おいしい映画」と「おいしいごはん」を真ん中に、みんなで繋がる映画祭

Dates:  October 12^th – 18^th, 2013
【日時】2013年10月12日（土）～10月18日（金）
Locations: Omotesando Hills and the Image Forum Theatre
【場所】12～14：表参道ヒルズ スペース オー12～18：シアター・イメージフォーラ
http://tokyogohan.com/

The Tokyo Food Lovers Film Festival is back for its fourth year with a mixture of festival favourites, classic foodie films, and some new films with a food theme.  What makes this film festival unique is that they partner with local chefs and restaurants to pair dishes with the films, making the film screenings a delight not only for the eyes and ears but also for the audience's senses of taste, smell, and touch.

Films that have shown at the festival before include the documentaries eatrip and El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, as well as the much loved indie fare Amélie and Bagdad Café.  This year sees a number of recent documentaries including heartfelt films Ten no Shizuku, Reviving Recipes, and Iranian Cookbook, not to mention the internationally acclaimed Jiro Dreams of Sushi.  There are also recent feature films such as the high school girl comedy-drama Otome no Recipe, Amole Gupte’s award-winning Stanley’s Tiffin Box (aka Stanley’s Lunch Box), and Ken Loach’s Cannes Jury Prize winner The Angel’s Share.  Other films I highly recommend are Louis Malle’s beautifully shot anarchic comedy Zazie dans le métro and Wong Kai-Wai’s dynamic Chungking Express.

This years films and their accompanying dishes:

Girl’s Recipes / Otome no recipe『乙女のレシピ』

Mitsuhiro Mihara, JAPAN, feature, 2012

Starring: Miho Kanazawa, Airi Kido, Mika Akizuki, Erena Watanabe and Mio Yuki

Dish:  Chef Okuda Original Dish

Special Guests: Chef Okuda, members of the cast

eatrip 『eatrip』

Yuri Nomura, JAPAN, documentary, 2009

Dish: Roast Chicken in a Green and Lemon Sauce

Amélie 『アメリ, 』

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, FRANCE, feature, 2001)

Starring: Audrey Tautou, André Dussollier, Mattieu Kassovitz, Rufus

Dish:  crème brûlée

Chungking Express 『恋する惑星』

 Wong Karwai, HONG KONG, feature, 1994)

Starring: Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu-Wair, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Valerie Chow

Dish:  Hong Kong Street Food

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress 『エル・ブリの秘密 世界一予約のとれないレストラン』

Gereon Wetzel, GERMANY, documentary, 2011)

Dish: presented by Food Creation  

Stanley’s Tiffin Box 『スタンリーのお弁当箱』

Amole Gupte, INDIA, feature, 2011

Starring: Partho A. Gupte, Numaan Sheikh, Abhishek Reddy

Dish:  Indian curry

Bagdad Café 『バグダッド・カフェ』

Percy Adlon, GERMANY/USA, feature, 1987

Starring: Marianne Sägebrecht, C.C.H. Pounder, Jack Palance

Dish: coffee and bread

Coffee and Cigarettes 『コーヒー&シガレッツ』

Jim Jarmusch, USA, feature (11 linked vignettes), 2003

Starring: Roberto Benigni, Bteve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits

Dish: coffee and hamburgers

Jiro Dreams of Sushi 『二郎は鮨の夢を見る』

David Gelb, USA, documentary, 2011

Featuring: Jiro Yoshino

Dish: sushi

Iranian Cookbook 『イラン式料理本』

Mohammad Shirvani, IRAN, docu-fiction, 2010

Dish: Iranian home cooking

The Angel’s Share 『天使の分け前』

Ken Loach, UK/FRANCE/BELGIUM/ITALY, feature, 2012

Starring: Paul Brannigan, John Henshaw, William Ruane, Gary Maitland

Dish: Scotch Whisky

Zazie dans le métro『地下鉄のザジ』

Louis Malle, FRANCE, feature, 1960

Starring: Catherine Demongeot, Philippe Noiret

Dish: blue mussels steamed in wine

Dinner Rush 『ディナーラッシュ』

Bob Giraldi, USA, feature, 2000

Starring: Danny Aiello, John Rothman, Frank Bongiorno

Dish: lobster pasta

Ten no Shizuku: Tatsumi Yoshiko “Inochi no Soup”

『天のしずく　辰巳芳子“いのちのスープ”』

Atsunori Kawamura, JAPAN, documentary, 2012

Featuring: Mitsuko Kusabue

Dish: potage bonne femme (leek, potato and carrot soup)

Reviving Recipes 『よみがえりのレシピ』

Satoshi Watanabe, JAPAN, documentary, 2011

Dish: Yamagata produce

Screening times and locations on the official website: http://tokyogohan.com/

Hatsumi (ハツミ, 2012)

Hatsumi: One Grandmother’s Journey Through the Japanese Canadian Internment (2012)

ハツミ：日系人強制収容所を経験した祖母の人生の旅路 

Tonight sees the launch of the DVD of Chris Hope’s moving documentary Hatsumi: One Grandmother’s Journey Through the Japanese Canadian Internment (2012) at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC) in Toronto.  Since the official Japanese Canadian Redress in 1988 many Nikkei have come forward to tell their stories of forced relocation.  In recent years, at the prompting of their children and grandchildren, many more stories have come to light that add to our understanding of this dark chapter in British Columbia’s history.

Many of the adults who experienced the forced internment have been reluctant to speak of their experiences.  In his animated documentary Minoru: Story of Exile; for example, Michael Fukushima speaks of “those silences” which are such “a large part of [his] identity.”  In Hatsumi, Chris Hope attributes those silences to the notion of shikata ga nai (仕方がない).  This expression literally means “it cannot be helped” and is generally used to describe circumstances that our beyond one’s control.  In North America, the idiom has often been used to explain how the Japanese were able to maintain their dignity in the face of the unavoidable circumstances they found themselves in after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Chris Hope describes how he often tried over the years to get his Nisei “Nana”, Nancy Hatsumi Okura, to tell him about her wartime experiences but that she was unwilling to share the whole painful story.  On the occasion of her eightieth birthday, after her stroke and recovery, Hope decides that the time has come to try to one last time to preserve Nancy Hatsumi's story for posterity.  Okura’s decision to tell her story reveals a wealth of information about herself and her immediate family that had previously remained in photo albums, diaries, and written correspondence.

Told in a straight-forward, first person documentary style, what makes Hope’s film stand out from previous films about the internment experience is his family’s remarkable archive.  His late Issei grandfather, Kenji "Ken" Okura, was an avid photographer and documented his family and his community in remarkable photographs and home videos both before and after the war.  He even managed to smuggle his camera into internment with him and documented his experiences as a forced labourer in Jasper. 

A young, well-to-do Vancouver couple with an infant daughter, both Ken and Nancy Hatsumi kept detailed journals of their experiences from the moment they sold off their dry cleaning business to move to Telegraph Cove on Vancouver Island at the beginning of the war.  Hope first tries to get his grandmother to tell her story by having her read parts of her journal out loud but she finds it too painful.  He changes tack and offers to take her to British Columbia to retrace her wartime journey.    

In the 1940s, Telegraph Cove was a quiet fishing village but today is a centre for ecotourism.  The wooden home that Ken Okura built still stands in the village and can be rented by tourists (see: Okura House).  As Nancy Hatsumi tours the house for the first time in over sixty years, the memories come flooding back as if it was yesterday.  An historical plaque dedicated to the Okuras marks the house and she is even able to meet with former neighbours who still live in the cove.  The passage of time has done nothing to dampen the feelings of both parties of the injustice done to the Okuras when they were given only three hours notice to throw together the possessions that they could carry before being shipped off to internment camps.

Hope and his grandmother also visit the unwelcoming livestock building that was used to house the women and children after they were separated from their husbands.  The building looks remarkably unchanged and brings home the inhumanity of how these Canadian citizens were treated by their own government.  Through historical documents such as NFB propaganda films and archival photographs, Hope demonstrates how a terrible combination of fear, ignorance, racism, and greed brought about this shameful injustice.

The most moving moment in the film comes when Chris Hope discovers that his grandmother’s brother, whom she always spoke of in the past tense, is still alive and living in Japan.  At the end of the war, the Japanese were still forbidden from returning to the Pacific Coast and were given two options: to move elsewhere in Canada or to return to Japan.  Nancy Hatsumi’s parents and siblings chose to return to Japan.  Eventually her parents and sisters returned to Canada, but her brother Tadao Hashimoto stayed on in the small city of Gobō in Wakayama Prefecture. 

Hashimoto suffered the most out of all of his family.  Born with childhood glaucoma, the forced internment meant that the family lost the means to pay for his medical treatment and he ended up going blind.  The blind have a special status in Japan – it has the largest Braille library in the world – and since the Tokugawa period blind people have traditionally been trained as anma masseurs.    Hashimoto received an education in Japan and had a successful career as a shiatsu masseur. 

Like his sister, Hashimoto proves reluctant to dwell on the past.  The subtle cultural differences between Canada and Japan raise their head in this sequence with confusion over what to say when entering the house and Hope’s inability to sit Japanese style.  Hope speaks only a few words of Japanese and Hashimoto has lost most of his English, so Nancy Hatsumi acts as the interpreter. In another example of shikata ga nai, Hashimoto is ambivalent towards the internment.  Although he has every right to be angry and bitter, Hashimoto seems content with how his life turned out.  Upon leaving, Nancy Hatsumi displays her “Canadianness” when they leave by embracing and kissing her brother and sister-in-law.   This moving reunion between a brother and sister after more than half a century brings home the terrible wrong done to them by the wartime government.  

With Hatsumi, Chris Hope has created an invaluable record of his grandmother and her family.  She is their last living link to traditional Japanese culture as Japanese Canadians rarely marry other Japanese (see: One Big Hapa Family).  At the same time, the film is an important contribution to the education of current and future generations of Canadians.  Not only does the film teach us about the past, Hope points out that Nancy Hatsumi’s courage in difficult times demonstrates that “the past should never limit a positive outlook for the future.”

Hatsumi is currently available to order via Amazon Canada.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Obāchan’s Garden (おばあちゃんのガーデン, 2001)

When sansei Canadian filmmaker Linda Ohama set out to make a film that would celebrate her grandmother’s life on the eve of her 100^th birthday, she had no idea just how far her journey would take her.  On the surface, there was more than enough material to make a feature-length documentary for her obāchan (grandma) had lived an extraordinary life in Canada.  Yet during the filming of Obāchan’s Garden (2001), the Murakami family discovers that the matriarch of the family has been keeping a painful secret about her early life in Japan for over 70 years.

Asayo Murakami (1898-2002) was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima Perfecture in 1898.  Her parents had named her Asayo because she was born in early in the morning (asa).  For her Canadian family, Asayo’s story began in 1924 when she came to Canada as a “picture bride”.  A man named Murakami had selected Asayo’s photograph as a potential future wife and paid for her journey to British Columbia.  Unfortunately, upon meeting Mr. Murakami, Asayo immediately rejected the possibility of marrying this short statured man.  She worked for three years in a fish cannery and picking strawberries to pay the man back the $250 dollars he had spent on her. 

Not long after this a matchmaker introduced her to the fishing boat craftsman Otokichi Murakami (of no relation to the man she had turned down) – a tall widower with two young children.  Asayo agreed to this marriage and the couple settled in the village of Steveston, which today belongs to the city of Richmond, British Columbia.  They went on to have 8 children of their own and Asayo was known locally for her wide social circle and her beautiful flower garden.  While most women filled their gardens with more practical crops of fruit and vegetables, Asayo preferred flowers – a sentimental preference which was connected to her private sorrows.

Like the other Japanese families living in coastal British Columbia, the Murakamis were forced to leave their home during World War II and were relocated to a sugar-beet farm in Manitoba.  After the war restrictions were lifted, the couple joined their eldest daughter and her family on their potato farm in Rainier, Alberta.  These were difficult times for the family  – the grandfather missed making boats and Asayo missed her garden  –  but they were resilient folk and persevered in the face of hardship.

Linda Ohama pieces together the life of her obāchan like a quilt.  Fragments of recollections by obāchan herself, Ohama’s mother and siblings, Ohama’s daughter, and other friends and relatives are woven together with a collection of family photos, archival footage from Japan and Canada, and dramatic reenactments of the past with the filmmaker’s cousin Natsuko Ohama playing obāchan in her younger years.  Docudrama elements in documentaries are a common, and sometimes controversial, feature in Canadian documentaries and may not be to everyone’s taste – but as the Murakami family had to leave everything behind when they left Steveston, the reenacted sequences bring colour and life to the home that obāchan loved best outside of Onomichi.

The film keeps coming back to one of obāchan’s prized possessions: a beautiful photograph of two smartly dressed little girls.  The secret that obāchan has kept for all these years is that before she came to Canada she was married to a man from a prominent family called Ishibashi.  For reasons that are unclear, around the time of the Great Kantō earthquake, Asayo was divorced from her husband and he took their daughters to live on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.  Asayo has been unable to trace her children, but has always believed that they were safe because they lived near the emperor and his family.   

The discovery of obāchan’s secret changes the course from a mere celebration of Asayo’s life to a quest to find out what happened to these two long-lost daughters.  At this point, according to the director's online diary, Ohama brought the National Film Board of Canada on board to help with funding and she set off to Japan with her mother and daughter – the first time the three women have been to visit obāchan’s family there.  It is a complicated journey, with many unexpected twists and turns, but it certainly makes riveting viewing.

Also interwoven with the story of obāchan is the story of her former home in Steveson.  The Murakami home and boat works, where they lived from 1929-1942 were the only buildings belonging to the Japanese to survive into the 1990s.  As they prepare for obāchan’s birthday, the family are involved in the restoration of the property which is now a part of the Britannia Heritage Shipyard Site in Richmond.  The film also documents the family’s restoration of the garden, which they plant according to obāchan’s instructions in preparation for the opening of the Murakami Visitor Centre in May 1998.

Is Linda Ohama able to track down obāchan’s daughters and is it possible for frail obāchan to travel to British Columbia from her nursing home in Alberta to see her garden in its restored glory?  You can enjoy the emotional ending of the film yourself on the NFB website:

Obachan's Garden by Linda Ohama, National Film Board of Canada

Since making this documentary Linda Ohama (リンダ・オオハマ/official profile) has developed strong ties between Canada and Japan.  She is currently in Japan on a lecture tour and is active in Tohoku region recovery efforts through her Canada-Tohoku-Japan Cloth Letters project.

To learn more about obāchan read:

Asayo Murakami: The Last Picture Bride and The Story of Ms. Asayo Murakami by family friend Kojiro “John” Iuchi

Jane Eyre (ジェーン・エア, 2011)

Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic romance Jane Eyre (1847) presents many challenges to a screenwriter looking to adapt the story into a film.  Not only is one burdened with the usual pressures remaining faithful to the characters and flavour of the novel while creating a new work, but Jane Eyre has been adapted dozens of times to film, radio, television, and the stage.   From the 1943 classic Hollywood adaptation starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine with its impressive score by Bernard Herrmann to the much loved BBC adaptations such as in the 1983 version with Timothy Dalton and Zelah Clarke, it has been done well so many times that it is a challenge to find a new angle to take with the story.

When I heard that Cary Jōji Fukunaga had taken on the challenge, I was both excited – surely the director of an impressive debut feature like Sin Nombre (2009) could bring something new and refreshing to Jane Eyre! – and trepidatious.  The trepidation was not only because of the great adaptations mentioned above but also because there have been two solid adaptations in recent memory: Franco Zefferelli’s 1996 version starring William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg and the wonderful 2006 BBC adaptation with Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson.  That being said, it is rare for even a very good adaptation of Jane Eyre to tick all the right boxes for me.  The biggest pitfalls are: making Jane too plain/boring, making Rochester so temperamental and creepy that one couldn't imagine Jane falling for him, and not exploring the Gothic nature of the story far enough.

Fukunaga’s version manages to avoid all of these pitfalls: Mia Wasikowska, with her expressive eyes, plays Jane as an intelligent young woman who knows her place in society but has just enough backbone to stand up for herself when she feels she is being badly treated.  Michael Fassbinder, who is one of those rare actors  able to transform himself completely into his characters, makes Rochester sympathetic enough for us to understand why Jane learns to love him, while at the same time showing him to be a man conflicted by the miserable cards that life has dealt him. There is also real chemistry between Wasikowka and Fassbinder – a must have when depicting a period where more is said through looks and demeanor than action.  A nod must also be given to the supporting cast – particularly Judi Dench who brings a great deal of warmth to Mrs. Fairfax, and Sally Hawkins who is practically unrecognizable as the horrid Mrs. Reed. This is  the first time that I have seen Hawkins play an unsympathetic character and she really took advantage of the opportunity to show her range as an actress.

This adaptation easily ranks as one of the best versions of Jane Eyre for two reasons: its use of landscape and its exploitation of the Gothic romance genre.  The moors play such an important role in setting atmosphere in the novel and this is the first adaptation that I felt really got the fact that the landscape like another character in the story.  Shot in the Hathersage moors (not quite Haworth moor but one probably couldn't shoot there without tourists getting in the way), Fukunaga and cinematographer Adriano Goldman really capture the connection between the landscape and the character of Jane.

The cinematography was also a key element of the Gothic look of the piece.  Being "Gothic" is not just about finding the right castle –  it is also about capturing the romance and suspense of a Gothic novel.  The interior scenes set at night in this adaptation make great use of dark and light.  This was a time where rooms would have only been lit by fireplaces, candles, and Paraffin lamps (aka Kerosene lamps in North America).  The lighting in these scenes not only captures the historical reality but the shadow also adds to the general suspense.  The scenes where Jane hears noises but does yet know what their source is are so expertly done that I found myself on the edge of my seat even though I knew exactly what was going to happen.  Many adaptations concentrate so strongly on building the character of Jane that they forget that the story belongs to the Gothic romance genre.  The dash of Hitchcock added to the mix made Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre well worth the price of admission.

cmmhotes 2012

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Cary Jōji Fukunaga is a Japanese-Swedish American director.  His debut feature film Sin Nombre (2009) won him much acclaim including the directing award at the Sundance Film Festival.  Warner Brothers has signed him up to adapt Stephen King’s It in two parts with Chase Palmer writing the screenplay. See The Hollywood Reporter for more details.

Muybridge’s Strings: Koji Yamamura and Selected Works from the NFB

Where: Skip City, Saitama

When: June 2 – July 22, 2012

Last weekend saw the opening of a Koji Yamamura exhibition at Skip City in Saitama Prefecture.  The centerpiece of the event is Yamamura’s co-production with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) Muybridge’s Strings (2011).  Muybridge’s Strings is playing with a selection of Yamamura’s top films from his early work for children Karo and Piyobupt: Imagination (1993), to his most recent short short Anthology with Cranes (2011) which is inspired by a 17^th century scroll painting by Tawaraya Sōtatsu.  Click on film titles for individual reviews.

Selected Works by Koji Yamamura

Karo and Piyobupt: Imagination (カロとピヨブプト-あめのひ, 1993)

Kid’s Castle (キッズキャッスル, 1995)

Mt. Head (頭山, 2002)

The Old Crocodile (年をとった鰐, 2005)

Fig（無花果, 2006) from Tokyo Loop

A Child’s Metaphysics (こどもの形而上学,2007)

Muybridge’s Strings (マイブリッジの糸, 2011)

Anthology with Cranes (鶴下絵和歌巻, 2011)

In addition, Yamamura has curated a selection of some of top NFB animated shorts past and present. 

Selected NFB Works

Canon (カノン, 1964)

by Norman McLaren and Grant Munro (ノーマン・マクラレン、グラント・マンロー)

Mindscape / Le paysagiste (心象風景, 1976)

by Jacques Drouin (ジャック・ドゥルーアン)

               

The Bead Game (ビーズゲーム, 1977)

by Ishu Patel (イシュ・パテル)

               

Jeu (技, 2006)  

by Georges Schwitzgebel (ジョルジュ・シュヴィッツゲベル)

Wild Life (ワイルド ライフ, 2011)      

by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby (アマンダ・フォービス、ウェンディ・ティルビー)

The exhibition also features original illustrations and storyboards.  The event runs until July 22^nd.

Muybridge's Strings is being released on Blu-ray in Japan in August.

Order the Flip Books today:

Muybridge no Ito 1  [Flip Book]

Muyvridge no Ito 2  [Flip Book]

Atsushi Wada’s The Great Rabbit and Selected World Animation at Image Forum

Where: Image Forum, Shibuya

When: June 23 -  July 13, 2012

 Atsushi Wada is presenting his award-winning film The Great Rabbit (2012) at Theatre Image Forum this summer.  The film will be presented in two separate programmes.  Programme A features a selection of top animation from around the world from David O'Reilly's award-winning The External World (2010) to  Emma de Swaef and Mark James Roels' puppet animation Oh, Willy. . . (2011).  Programme B offers audiences the possibility of seeing all of Atsushi Wada's animated shorts in chronological order in one sitting. A fantastic opportunity for fans of indie animation in the Tokyo area.

Click on film titles below to read individual reviews.

Programme A

The Great Rabbit and a Selection of World Animation

1.  The External World (David O’Reilly, Germany, 2010)

2.  Das Haus (David Buob, Germany, 2011)

3.  Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage (Bastien Dubois, France, 2009)

4.  Belly (Julia Pott, UK, 2011)

5.  Holiday (Ryo Hirano, Japan, 2011)

6.  Modern No. 2 (Mirai Mizue, Japan, 2011)

7.  Oh Willy. . . (Mark James Roels and Emma De Swaef, Belgium, 2011)

8.  3/11 no Kakera (Shiriagari Kotobuki, Japan, 2011)

9.  The Great Rabbit (Atsushi Wada, France/Japan, 2012)

Programme B

The Great Rabbit and the Oeuvre of Atsushi Wada

1.  Be Vague (2002)

2.  This Mayonnaise is Too Runny (2002)

3.  A Whistle (2003)

4.  Yellow (2003) 

5.  Dancer of the Vermicular (2004)

6.  Concerning the Rotation of a Child (2004)

7.  Clerk in Charge (2004)

8.  Day of Nose (2005)

9.  Gentle Whistle, Bird, and Stone (2005)

10.  Manipulated Man (2006)

11.  Well, That’s Glasses (2007)

12.  In a Pig’s Eye (2010)

13.  Mechanism of Spring (2010)

14.  The Great Rabbit (2012)

More information about the programme is available on the CALF website (JP only).  Atsushi Wada's collected works 2002-2010 are also available to order online (JP/EN).  Read my review of the DVD here.  Read my interview with Wada here.

Help Jeff Chiba Stearns complete his documentary Mixed Match

The Canadian animator Jeff Chiba Stearns, director of the inventive documentary One Big Hapa Family (see my review) is raising funds on IndieGoGo to complete his latest film Mixed Match - a documentary designed to raise awareness about the need for more mixed race bone marrow and cord blood donors.  The sooner this documentary can get the message out to the wider community, the more lives will be saved.  The IndieGoGo campaign ends in 33 hours and your help is desperately needed.  Go to IndieGoGo to learn more and DONATE NOW!!

If you cannot donate money, you can help by getting the word out.  I also recommend putting yourself on the national bone marrow registry so that you can help save lives.  See the bottom of this post for information on how to do this for Canadians and Americans.

In the words of the filmmakers:

The Story

Mixed Match is an inspirational, emotional, and evocative feature-length documentary that explores the need to find mixed ethnicity bone marrow and cord blood donors to donate to multiethnic patients suffering from life threatening blood diseases such as leukemia.  This live action and animated film is a dramatic journey focusing on the main characters’ struggles to survive against incredible odds. 

The documentary will lead the viewer through the lives of young patients and families struggling to overcome life-threatening blood diseases.  While presenting medical concerns, Mixed Match will be a character-driven documentary that will highlight a number of exceptional, courageous, and inspiring participants. The film will follow recently diagnosed multiethnic patients in search of donors, some of whom must struggle to hold on to hope through countless rounds of excruciating chemotherapy as they spend months searching for a match.  A patient who is in remission after a successful stem cell/marrow donation will also be documented.  Another patient’s story is told through his surviving family members, as he was not able to find a suitable marrow match and, as a result, ultimately succumbed to his illness.  Lastly, the documentary will feature a joyous and heartfelt reunion between a donor and patient after a successful transplant, as the two meet for the very first time.  

Mixed Match is an important human story told from the perspective of youth who are forced to discover their identities through their deadly illnesses and how their mixed backgrounds threaten their chance at survival, thus highlighting why in this day and age, knowing our history and cultural heritage still matters.

The film is being produced by Meditating Bunny Studio Inc. (www.meditatingbunny.com), working very closely with Mixed Marrow (www.mixedmarrow.org).

The Impact

Race and ethnicity play a critical role in finding a marrow match for those suffering from fatal blood diseases. It is a lesser-known fact that in order for a marrow or stem cell match to occur between a patient and a donor, genetic markers on cells must line up.  Because these markers are inherited from parents, their children are a blend both of their parents’ markers.  Thus, for mixed patients, their mono-racial parents and relatives will not likely be a match, and their siblings only hold about a 1 in 4 chance of being a match. Many markers on the cells are specific to certain ethnic groups so multiethnic people have a difficult time when their tissue typing has unusual or uncommon combinations.  To put this in perspective, if your background is Egyptian, Japanese, and Russian, there is a likely chance that only another person with a similar ethnic blend could be a possible donor if you are diagnosed with leukemia.

Mixed Match addresses the fact that every year over 30,000 people in North America are diagnosed with life threatening blood diseases. For many patients, a bone marrow transplant is their only chance at survival. Currently, in the US, of the 7 million registered bone marrow donors and 100,000 cord blood donors, less than 3% are multiethnic.  This statistic, although proportionate to the population of mixed people in the country, poses a substantial challenge to a mixed patient given the endless variety of possible genetic combinations in the registry.  Finding a multiethnic marrow match in the public registry has been compared at times to “finding a needle in a haystack” or “winning the lottery.”  Therefore, this is a very timely and important issue. 

According to the 2010 US Census, the number of people who associate with having more than one ethnic background has increased by almost 50% since 2000.  Despite the rapid growth of the multiracial population in almost all reaches of the world, many people do not realize the risks that lie ahead for mixed people with blood diseases, and the hardship that comes with an almost endless search for a donor match.  

In Canada, there are only 1,694 searchable registrants identifying as multiethnic out of the over 277,000 that are currently on Canada's stem cell Network according to OneMatch.  We need to increase this number to help save lives. 

With this film, we are setting out to achieve two goals:

Spread awareness of the challenges and complexities faced by mixed people with blood diseases.

Encourage all people from all backgrounds to join the bone marrow registry and donate core blood to increase the likelihood of finding multiethnic marrow matches.  There are some rare cases where mixed people find matches from monoracial or people of different mixes so it's important to have everyone's support!

Other Ways You Can Help

Another great way to help us complete this movie would be to spread the word about this fundraising to your friends and acquaintances, as well as visiting the Mixed Match page (www.facebook.com/mixedmatch) and clicking the like button so we can keep you updated on our progress.  Of course we encourage you to join your national bone marrow registry and hopefully help save a life.  Please check out www.blood.ca (OneMatch) in Canada andwww.marrow.org (Be The Match) in the US for more info on how to register.  

Check out a CBC radio interview where Jeff, the director, talks about the importance of making Mixed Match at this link: http://www.cbc.ca/nxnw/featured-guests/2012/03/29/jeff-chiba-stearns-documentary-mixed-match/