Connectivity: An Evening with Rea Tajiri

The Carsey-Wolf Center is honored to have welcomed filmmaker Rea Tajiri for a one-night retrospective of her work on ancestral time and the Japanese American experience. The event opened with History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991) , Tajiri’s experimental mediation on her family’s forced incarceration during the Second World War. While “there are things in the world we have images for,” other things, as she reminds us, are beholden to the limits of collective memory and the spirits of the dead. Poetically driven by her family’s disjointed recollections of their own imprisonment, Tajiri’s film interweaves an array of memorabilia, interviews, and intergenerational pilgrimage to visually conjure and reimagine what has been stolen and what has been lost. Released over thirty years later, Wisdom Gone Wild (2022) follows Tajiri’s mother Rose, and her gradual descent into the dream logic of dementia. Tajiri bears witness as Rose collapses past and present and transforms into a time traveler, connecting mother and daughter to both their ancestral lineage and each other in revelatory ways. Made over sixteen years, Wisdom Gone Wild is a radically intimate cine-poem that poignantly reflects on the transformative possibilities of aging, care, and collaborative remembrance. Following our screening of History and Memory and Wisdom Gone Wild, filmmaker Rea Tajiri joined moderator Kelsey Moore (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a discussion of her films. Rea Tajiri is an award-winning documentary director/producer and 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Film and Video. Her work situates itself in poetic, non-traditional storytelling forms to encourage dialogue and reflection around buried histories. Tajiri’s groundbreaking documentary short History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991) premiered at the Whitney Biennial and received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association, among other accolades. Her latest documentary feature Wisdom Gone Wild (2022) has received seven awards and made its national broadcast debut on the PBS docuseries POV. Other film credits include Passion for Justice: Yuri Kochiyama (1993) , Lordville (2014) , and her dramatic feature film Strawberry Fields (1997) , which had its European premiere at the 54th Venice Film Festival and screened on the Criterion Channel. Tajiri and her films have received support from the USA Artist’s Fellowship; the NorthStar Fellowship; the Chicken & Egg Award; the Ford Foundation; the Pew Fellowship in the Arts; the Leeway Transformation Award; the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship; several NEA Visual Arts Fellowships; and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has worked extensively throughout the U. S. as a visiting professor and artist-in-residence, and she is currently a professor in the Film and Media Arts department at Temple University. Kelsey Moore is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies and a graduate student researcher with the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara. Her current research examines the relationship between archival theory and media preservation, intergenerational memory, and the visual legacies of Japanese American incarceration. She previously served as an assistant digital media archivist for the Sherman Grinberg Film Library and on the editorial teams for Women and Hollywood, Camera Obscura, and Media Fields. Kelsey’s research has been supported by the UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship, the Mellon Foundation, and the Walter H. Capps Center, among others. She is a gosei descendent of Heart Mountain concentration camp. This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center, the Center for Feminist Futures, and the Department of Asian American Studies. The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-26 feature series Connectivity examines the evolving meaning of connection in our contemporary moment. While the term “connectivity” often invokes our ever-increasing entanglement with digital infrastructure and social media networks, this series reimagines the term not only as a technical feature of media, but as a humanistic value and a condition of social and public life. This series embraces connectivity as a framework for thinking critically about the ways in which people use media to connect with ideas and with one another, from the shared experience of moviegoing to the collective bonds forged through storytelling and public dialogue. The Carsey-Wolf Center is committed to screening documentaries from across the world that engage with contemporary and historical issues, especially regarding social justice and environmental concerns. Documentaries allow filmmakers to address pressing issues and frame the critical debates of our time.