Steven Okazaki

Steven Okazaki (born 1952 in Los Angeles ) is an American director ; mostly from documentaries . In his own films, he often works as a writer , film editor and producer .

Life

Okazaki was born and raised in Venice, a borough of Los Angeles.

He and his grandparents and parents experienced discrimination because of their Japanese appearance. He studied at San Francisco State University , where he received his bachelor's degree in film in 1976 . In 2009 he was inducted into their Hall of Fame .

He visited Japan for the first time around 1982 and he says of himself: He feels familiar with both American and Japanese cultures, but feels that he is an outsider in both.

Okazaki lives in Berkeley and is married to journalist Peggy Orenstein . They have a daughter named Daisy Tomoko. His wife has written a book about the difficulties involved in getting this, called Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night , and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother ISBN 1-59691-210-3 .

Farallon Films is the name of Okazaki's production company.

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Okazaki began his filmmaking career in 1976 with short films for the children's program at Churchill Films . In 1985 his Oscar-nominated documentary about the internment of Japanese Americans with the title Unfinished Business was released . The following year, Living on Tokyo Time , a film made under his direction about a marriage between a Japanese woman and an American of Japanese origin, was released in cinemas .

With Days of Waiting from 1991, a short documentary about Estelle Peck Ishigo, he took up the topic of unfinished business again. In Troubled Paradise he documents four people who want to preserve the Hawaiian culture , as well as the social and political problems of the indigenous population . Another feature film under his direction was released in 1994, the low-budget production The Lisa Theory is about a musician named Devon who prefers not to get out of bed after his girlfriend Lisa ends their relationship. Variety rated the film as "goofy" and "witty". In 1995, Okazaki finished an eighteen-minute documentary about young adults infected with HIV .

In 2000, the episode Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End Of the Street of the America Undercover documentary series about heroin addicts was released in San Francisco. Okazaki worked on this film for HBO for three years. When recording, he was confronted with the ethical problems of a documentary filmmaker, although he tried to document everything else, this was not always possible, for example in the case of an overdose where work was interrupted and life-saving measures were initiated. After all, you have to be able to live with yourself. ( [...] you have to live with yourself. ) Five years later he shot for HBO Rehab , a documentary about drug withdrawal in a dedicated center in Santa Cruz and the everyday life that followed the withdrawal.

In the same year a short documentary called The Mushroom Club was released . Since his first visit to Japan, he had actually wanted to make a large-scale film about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but encountered various obstacles, such as doubts about his own competence, unwillingness to cooperate in the USA and Japan and financial problems, which is why he only made a small film. He characterizes this as "a little tribute, a bow and a thank you, to the people of Hiroshima [...] to pay off the debt I felt to them for sharing their stories with me". In 2007, two years later, Okazaki released White Light / Black Rain , a full-length documentary on the same topic. He tried not to take sides because he rejects "docu-gandas" à la Michael Moore . Rather, the audience should be made to listen to the stories of the people portrayed, both hibakusha and the American soldiers involved, since, as shown at the beginning of the film, even many young Japanese do not know what happened on August 6, 1945 . Unlike other documentaries, where every bit of drama is picked up, the difficulty in making this film was not to lose the audience's attention to emotional overwhelm.

The documentary The Conscience of Nhem En is about a different aspect of Asian history. Here Okazaki recorded the accounts of survivors from Tuol Sleng Prison and the prison photographer, a sixteen-year-old soldier by the name of Nhem En.

His documentary Approximately Nels Cline , released in 2011, has Nels Cline , the guitarist of Wilco , as the protagonist. For the short film All We Could Carry , which appeared in the same year , he returned to the topic of interning Japanese people and interviewed twelve people about their experiences in the War Relocation Centers .

Filmography (selection)

• 1986: Unfinished Business (as a writer, director, cameraman, editor and producer)
• 1987: Living on Tokyo Time (as writer, director, cameraman and editor)
• 1990: Days of Waiting (as director, cameraman, editor and producer)
• 1992: Troubled Paradise (as writer, director, cameraman, editor and producer)
• 1993: The Lisa Theory . Feature film, 80 min.
• 1994: Crumb (as camera assistant )
• 1995: Alone Together: Young Adults Living with HIV (as director)
• 2000: Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End Of the Street (as director, cameraman, editor and producer)
• 2005: The Mushroom Club (as a director)
• 2005: Rehab (as director and producer)
• 2007: White Light / Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as screenwriter, director and producer)
• 2008: The Conscience of Nhem En (as director, cameraman, editor and producer)
• 2009: Unlisted: A Story of Schizophrenia (as co-director)
• 2010: Crushed: The Oxycontin Interviews (as a director)
• 2011: Approximately Nels Cline (as director, editor and producer)
• Have You Seen Me.
• 2011: All We Could Carry . Documentary, 15 min.
• 2015: Heroin: Cape Cod, USA. Documentary, 75 min.

Prizes and awards

Okazaki's films have been nominated for various awards and have received many awards. So he got z. B. an Oscar in 1991 for Best Documentary Short Film for Days of Waiting , as well as Oscar nominations for Unfinished Business , The Mushroom Club and The Conscience of Nhem En .

Web links

• Steven Okazaki in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Farfilm.com website of its production company Farallon Films .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} biography: http://www.farfilm.com/biography/
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} http://www.womeninworldcinema.com/2007/08/interview-with-steven-okazaki-director.html
3. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ ^{a b} http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/2728433  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ http://www.truelives.org/pg_daysofwaiting.html
8. ↑ Lisa, 1993: http://www.farfilm.com/#/the-lisa-theory/
9. ↑ Okazaki 2011 on Farfilm.com
10. ↑ Heroin 2015 - on HBO.com - on Farfilm.com - on Youtube in German