No sooner did I returned from LA than I had to turn around to head to Toronto for the Female Eye Film Festival. But who’s complaining?!! June in Toronto is Gorgeous, and I was looking forward to reconnecting with my dear college/rowing friend (and ALLY supporter) Chris Toperczer, whom I hadn’t seen in 20 years!
Just before our screening, we learned that we had won the Female Eye Jury Prize for Best Documentary!! The award ceremony took place the night of our screening. The hand-forged statuette, designed and sculpted by Willie Anicic, is Simply Stunning!!!
I’m amazed by how many wonderful connections I was able to make during my 30 hours in Toronto. There seems to be a direct correlation between number of hours I spend at a place and the intensity of my interactions…
A Lot Like You – Female Eye Film Festival 2012 by William Brownridge
What we’re looking for in life is frequently not what we find. Call it fate or coincidence, a journey of self-discovery will often lead a person to an unexpected place. Director Eliaichi Kimaro found just that in her documentary A Lot Like You. A first generation American, born to a Tanzanian father and Korean mother, Eliaichi was raised in Washington, DC surrounded by her mother’s family. When her parents retired and moved back to Tanzania, she decided to travel with them to find out about her father’s past and her roots among the Chagga tribe on Mt. Kilimanjaro. What Eliaichi finds is that she shares more things in common with the women of the Chagga tribe than she could ever have known.
Throughout most of the film, viewers learn about the lives of Eliaichi’s father and mother. The success that her father found in a very difficult school system in Tanzania allowed him to move to America to continue his studies. That’s where he meets Eliaichi’s mother. Struggling through the turmoil of America in the ’60s, the story of their love is touching and funny. This was not a time of acceptance for interracial couples, so the odds were always against them. That their love survived is a strong indication of their strength, and this is reflected in Eliaichi as her story of growing up is intertwined with events in the film.
It’s when Eliaichi begins to focus on her aunts and uncles in Tanzania that the film starts to find its real focus. As her aunts reveal some of the massive cultural differences, Eliaichi starts to realize that her own childhood is tied directly to events in her aunts lives. She had originally been searching for her roots among the Chagga tribe, but Eliaichi soon finds connections between the path she’s chosen in life, and the lives of the women in the Chagga tribe.
It’s very interesting to see the differences between cultures as we learn more about the lives of the Tanzanian people. Some of the stories are uplifting, while some are heartbreaking. While Eliaichi begins to find what she was looking for, and more, the women of the Chagga tribe that she speaks to also find peace in sharing their stories. Even though Eliaichi may have started searching for a way to bring some meaning to her life, by listening to members of her family, she has helped to heal the differences and problems they had with each other. It’s an unexpected turn of events, and probably not something that Eliaichi had anticipated.
A Lot Like You screens on Sunday, June 24, 2012 at 3:30 pm as part of the Female Eye Film Festival. Tickets and information can be found on their website.
In the past month, we’ve received invitations to submit our film to festivals in
Taiwan, Rwanda, Vancouver, London, and most recently, this one from Argentina.
After weathering our share of “Thanks, but no thanks” early on,
it sure is nice to be able to share one of these… Enjoy!
Dear Eliaichi Kimaro,
As we talked about last year, here we are again to invite you to participate with your film “A Lot Like You” to the 3rd CineMigrante International Film Festival, Film and Education in human rights of migrants, to be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina in September 2012.
Our Festival aims to denature impermeable identities on which our current society is built, favoring the development of respect for diversity. We promote films and cultural activities that enable intercultural dialogue and integration of cultures in pursuit of an identity construction that places the human being in the center of its matter, addressing migration from a point of view relegated by the stereotypes built from the current mass media. Continue reading →
with fellow Jurors, Alonso Duralde and Anna Sampers
On Memorial Day, we three Jurors met for the first time at the McMenamin’s on Queen Anne. Anna Sampers is an award-winning filmmaker and has been the Shorts Programs curator for the Milwaukee Film Festival for the past three years. Alonso Duralde is the film critic for The Wrap/Reuters and has written about film for Movieline, Salon, MSNBC.com, and HitFix. He also co-hosts the Linoleum Knife podcast, regularly appears on What the Flick?! (The Young Turks Network), and is the author of Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas (Limelight Editions) and 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men (Advocate Books).
Charged with whittling SIFF’s 153 programmed shorts down to a winning 3, each of us arrived braced for a long afternoon of deliberation and debate. With SIFF generously offering to ply us with food and drink, we pulled out our spreadsheets and started to pour over our favorites. I was amazed. The process was far less painful than I had imagined. Our lists of faves overlapped considerably, which helped whittle down the pool of contenders.
Then we got down to serious business as we began championing our favorite films. We debated the ideal qualities of a winning short and weighed the relative merits of our favorite films, while considering the balance of our selection overall. After some juicy debating and bargaining, we made our final decision–one we all came away feeling really good about. (FYI, credit for the eloquently pithy film blurbs goes to Alonso, who came up with these off the top of his head.)
A Lot Like You had its World Premiere at Seattle International Film Festival on May 24, 2011. SIFF rolled out the red carpet for the event. The beautiful Landmark Harvard Exit theater erupted in applause when we invited Mama Kimaro to join us onstage for the post-screening Q&A. Then the party rolled over to Roy Street Coffeehouse, where we continued our conversations well into the night.
Every minute was fantastically exquisite and surreal…
From “Worlds Apart” to “A Lot Like You”: A Filmmaker’s Journey Saturday, June 16, 2012 12:30PM – 1:30PM
National Center for the Preservation of Democracy – Democracy Forum
Director Eliaichi Kimaro reflects on the power of personal storytelling to mobilize people, ignite dialogue, and contribute to the groundswell that leads to change…
Having worked for 15 years as a community organizer and trauma counselor in Washington, DC and Seattle, Ms. Kimaro took her activism to a wider audience by merging her beliefs, experiences and creativity in the medium of film. The result is her directorial debut, the award-winning personal documentary, A Lot Like You.
Using her film journey as a backdrop, Ms. Kimaro will engage the Mixed Roots community in discussion about the important connections between creative expression and experience in strategically re-centering conversations around ethnicity, identity, culture, accountability and justice.
$5 advance and day of at the door
All ages welcome; recommended for 13 and over Buy Tickets
Pete Droge – A Lot Like You music video (Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Doors will open at 6 p.m., with an intimate live performance by Pacific Northwest singer/songwriter and soundtrack composer Pete Droge. The film will begin at 6:45 p.m., with a Q&A by filmmaker Eliaichi Kimaro to follow immediately after. McMenamins ales, wines, spirits and pub fare will be available for purchase throughout the screening.
About The Oregon Premiere of “A Lot Like You”
“A Lot Like You takes us on a personal journey into the most vulnerable corners of a family history spanning generations and continents. This layered documentary starts with a familiar exploration of mixed-race identity as the narrator searches for her roots, but brings the discussion to surprising levels of personal and political self-awareness. Fresh and inspired, tender and uncommonly smart, A Lot Like You triumphs as an exemplary work of first-person documentary for the 21st century.”
— Jury Statement for BEST DOCUMENTARY AWARD San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival
About Pete Droge
Pete Droge is a Pacific Northwest native and folk rock singer/songwriter from Vashon Island, Wa. Subtly beautiful and poignant in its own right, the score for Eliaichi Kimaro’s film, A Lot Like You, finds Droge blending folk-tinged acoustic guitar with ambient soundscapes, and even some re-working of material from his 2006 release, Under the Waves. The result is an intimate and cohesive marriage of picture and score. The soundtrack is available through Droge’s website. The artist will perform several tracks from the film soundtrack prior to the screening.
When we were invited to screen A Lot Like You at the 30th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, I knew I wanted to bring Lucy with me. SFIAAFF is the largest and most prestigious showcase for new Asian American and Asian films in North America, and I wanted Lucy to be immersed in the experience of screening her film (she takes the dedication very seriously) at this amazing festival. So we agreed that she would keep a journal of her SF trip to share with her kindergarten classmates.
Lucy was inspired by our friend Anne Conroy-Baiter’s beautiful artist journal of her recent trip to Portland, and decided to do the same. So she wrote and drew through our entire trip, and didn’t show me her writing/drawings til she was done.
This is what she had to say…(translations of Lucy’s Guess&Go spelling are in the captions, if you need the assist.)
[Click on image to pause/play…]
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Being with Lucy in SF was a game changer for me — having her experience first-hand the energy shift in the room as the audience opens up to our story, falls in love with my parents, and then goes along for the ride. She felt the intimacy and vulnerability of our post-screening conversations. She saw the hugs, witnessed the tears, heard the stories.
So even if it means that her mama’s away from home more often now, she really gets what I’m doing and why. And Lucy believes her film’s work in the world is “really important”.
We have been invited to participate in Reel Change: Managing Social Issue Film Campaigns – presented by Working Films and The Fledgling Fund in collaboration with the Center for Social Media.
Thanks to the generous support of our dear friends, Jeff and Jamie Merriman-Cohen, we are able to attend this intensive 3-day workshop that could not be any more timely or tailor-made to meet our current needs. We are so grateful and keen and ready to put what we learn to immediate use!!
This interactive workshop will focus on developing audience engagement campaigns that lay the groundwork for authentic social impact. With experts on hand who can speak from first-hand experience, we will learn how to (1) develop audience engagement strategies for documentary films/transmedia projects; (2) coordinate key elements of a campaign, learning how to leverage opportunities for social change while pursuing income-generating strategies for distribution; and (3) create evaluation strategies that will allow us to identify, measure, and duplicate our successes.
And for those of us who are currently working on a particular project, we will have the opportunity to workshop our ideas and get some hands-on learning that specifically address the needs of our project.
Everyone I know who’s attended this workshop has returned Raving about how invaluable this experience was. Can’t wait infuse some of that energy, enthusiasm and know-how into our film’s outreach efforts!
Director Eliaichi Kimaro reflects on the power of personal storytelling to mobilize people, ignite dialogue, and contribute to the groundswell that leads to change…
