Wisdom Gone Wild
2022 • Feature Documentary: 84 min.
Directed by Rea Tajiri
Produced by Sian Evans/Farthest Films
PREMIERE: Black Star Film Festival 2022
NATIONAL BROADCAST: POV
In 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. Tajiri shows us how to enter the world of a person living with dementia in order to connect through listening, art, and music. A delicate interweaving of past and present, parenting and being parented, the film reflects on the reliability of memory and the desire to reinvent one's own life when memories fail us. It is a poignant meditation on mothers and daughters and the abiding strength of the unique relationship between them.
The film tells the story of a life to be valued, rather than a problem to be willed away.
EDUCATIONAL DISTRIBUTION: Good Docs
AWARDS:
Jury Award, Honorable Mention, Best Documentary Feature
Austin Asian American Film Festival
Jury Award, Honorable Mention, Best Documentary
Blackstar Film Festival
Grand Jury Prize
San Diego Asian Film Festival
Jury Award, Best Documentary Feature
Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival
PRESS:
“..Without falling into self-centered trappings of nostalgic family documentaries, Wisdom is a patient meditation on life, time, and love, and a confrontation with monumental loss…Blurs the lines by which we define ourselves and the roles we play in love… a slow burn that singes but doesn’t sever.”
-HYPERALLERGIC (Bedhatri Choudhury)
"Tajiri relishes in the poetics of personhood…”
-ASIAN ARTS INITIATIVE | Anne Ishii, Executive Director
“A brilliant film ripping apart memory.... and our contracts with history and family as subjects…”
-Tiffany Sia, Founder of Speculative Place, Filmmaker/Writer
“An intimate documentary film that engages the imagination to grapple with dementia and Japanese American history.”
-BOMB Magazine (Brandon Shimoda)
“...a vérité portrait of a mother who, in her dementia, maintains a sense of humor, a stubborn autonomy, and occasionally a glimpse of who she once was…The complex dynamics of an immigrant family are revealed…”
-DOCUMENTARY MAGAZINE (Pat Aufderheide)
CREDITS:
Rea Tajiri: director
Sian Evans: producer
Catherine Hollander: editor
Reiko Tahara: associate producer
Shakuru Tajiri: sound composition and design
Steve Espinola: title music
Supported by:
ITVS Diversity Development Fund
Center for Asian American Media Documentary Fund Award
JustFilms/Ford Foundation
Independence Philadelphia Media Fund
Temple University Vice Provost’s Research Grant
Additional support from:
The Leeway Transformation Award
Pew Fellowship in the Arts