A Song for Ourselves, directed by Tadashi Nakamura, is an intimate journey into the life and music of Asian American Movement troubadour Chris Iijima. During the 1970’s when Asians in America were invisible to the country–and more importantly even to themselves–the late Chris Iijima’s music provided the voice and identity an entire generation had been in search of. Through animated photographs, intimate home movies, archival footage and Chris’ own songs, A Song For Ourselves shows how Chris’ music unleashed the contagious energy of the Asian American Movement with an unrelenting passion for social justice and a life well lived.
The film will premiere in Los Angeles at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. Look for the film to come to a film festival near you. If you can’t make it there, download the Mixtape by DJ Phatrick featuring the music of Blue Scholars, Bambu, Kiwi, Chris Iijima, Nobuko Miyamoto and Charlie Chin. That’s a 19 track mixtape for FREE. Finally, follow the journey of A Song for Ourselves on its blog.
A Song for Ourselves
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More about Tadashi Nakamura
Tadashi Nakamura is a 28 year old, fourth-generation Japanese American and second-generation filmmaker. His introduction to film began when he was 9 days old and made his first and last on-screen appearance in Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980), the first feature-length narrative film produced by Asian Americans, which was directed by his father, award-winning filmmaker Robert A. Nakamura. Besides carrying on his parents’ work – his mother is writer/producer Karen L. Ishizuka – Nakamura seeks to tell his community’s history to a new generation.
A Song for Ourselves is the third installment of Nakamura’s trilogy on the Asian American Movement. The first was Yellow Brotherhood (2003), a personal documentary about the meaning of friendship and community through a youth organization called Yellow Brotherhood, which was formed in the 1960s to help youth get off drugs. It won Best Documentary Short at the San Diego Asian Film Festival. The second was Pilgrimage (2007), which tells the story of how an abandoned WWII concentration camp for Japanese Americans was transformed into a symbol of retrospection and solidarity for people of all nationalities in our post 9/11 world. It was an official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and has garnered nine awards of excellence including three for Best Short Documentary. Nakamura has a M.A. in Social Documentation from UC Santa Cruz, a B.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA and was born and raised in Los Angeles.