Peachy: “Changing Season” captures the passing of a family farm from one generation to the next

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NOTE: “Changing Season” will be screened during the Colorado Dragon Film Festival on Sunday, May 22 at 12 noon. Click here for full information about the festival.

You’d think after a lifetime of growing and harvesting peaches, you’d get sick of eating them. But the Masumoto family still loves peaches and serves them up every way imaginable. David “Mas” Masumoto, 62, the farmer who has nurtured his parents’ peach groves, says “Actually no. I love peaches, almost literally in my blood.”

Nikiko Masumoto, his daughter, adds, “We have 10 varieties and each has a window of ripeness for two weeks. So it’s like getting to see your best friends for two weeks out of the year.”

The father-and-daughter interaction is central to the delightful dynamics of “Changing Season: On the Masumoto Family Farm,” a documentary by director Jim Choi. The film follows the two, as well as the farm’s matriarch, Marcy and Nikiko’s brother Korio, through a transitional year not only in the farm but in the family’s life.

The Masumoto Family Farm, which produces nectarines and raisins in addition to peaches, was purchased and first tilled by Mas’ father, Takashi “Joe” Masumoto, in 1948. The family had returned to California’s Central Valley after spending World War II in a concentration camp in Arizona along with thousands of other Japanese American families.

Mas wasn’t planning on following in his father’s footsteps. He attended the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1970s, thinking he’d escaped the sweat and labor. “I studied something that I thought would never bring me back to the farm: Sociology, he says. “But it got me to study how a plant grows and everything around the peach” – the whole community of people and processes that produce the fruit.

He ended up embracing the sociology of farming as part of the ecosystem that connected humans to the Earth. And maybe Cal helped lead Mas to be an early adopter of organic farming.

“When I was growing up it was somewhat conventional. At the time fertilizers and pesticides were expensive. When we were transitioning to organics, I relied on my father’s experience of farming. It was much simpler.”
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“Linsanity” DVD now available for everyone to be inspired all over again by Jeremy Lin’s story

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Evan Jackson Leong, the director of the entertaining and inspiring documentary “Linsanity: The Jeremy Lin Story,” tells interviewers that Lin’s story “transcends sports, race and culture.” That’s true enough, because Jeremy Lin‘s story — a determined young man loves basketball above all else but is ignored by colleges and the NBA despite his talent, and perseveres in the end by sheer determination and religious faith — is universal.

But as an Asian American, Lin’s story is inspirational for me precisely because he’s Asian American. His ethnicity was the main reason he was dismissed by colleges and the NBA, even though he was an all-star leader in high school.

I hope everyone watches “Linsanity,” which went on sales on DVD this week, and is inspired by his universal story, or his incredible accomplishment as an Asian American.

I know many Asian Americans watched it at film festivals, or during one of many special fundraising screenings for Asian and Asian American nonprofit organizations across the country. In Colorado it was screened by an Asian American fraternity at the University of Colorado in Boulder and a Japanese American history group in Denver. If Asians didn’t watch the documentary in a theater, they probably watched it on cable TV — Comcast featured it in its Asian American channel for months.

But it’s great to revisit “Linsanity” on DVD (wish there were some extras added, though).
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Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, 1920-2012

Filmmaker Linda Hattendorf posted the sad news today on the Facebook page for “The Cats of Mirikitani,” the wonderful and powerful documentary she made in 2006:

It is with deep deep sorrow that we must share the sad news that our dear friend Jimmy Mirikitani passed away on Sunday October 21. He was 92 years old. Thank you for all the love you have shown him; his friends and fans meant the world to him.

There will be a public memorial on December 9 at 5 pm in New York at the Japanese American Association, 15 West 44th Street, 11th floor, New York, NY 10036. All are welcome.

Mirikitani turned 92 this past summer, just before he visited Denver for a whirlwind weekend for an opening reception at a gallery exhibit of his artwork, and a screening of Hattendorf’s film. (The video above is from the gallery opening, when he was presented with a birthday cake.)

Mirikitani and the filmmaker, along with the film’s producer Masa Yoshikawa, had been on the road for a week already, and attended a pilgrimage to the Tule Lake internment camp from San Francisco. After Denver, the trio were headed to New Mexico for another screening and art exhibit.

He was adorable, a feisty old man full of good humor and the determined energy that served him through his long journey through the edges of American society.
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Help get Anna May Wong on PBS!

If you don’t know who Anna May Wong was, she was an Asian American pioneer in Hollywood who deserves wider recognition. Filmmaker Yunah Hong has produced a one-hour documentary about Wong, “Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words” that’s been screened at the Busan International Film Festival in Korea, and at festivals across the US and Canada. The film was completed with the help of the Center for Asian American Media, an offshoot of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Now she’s hoping to air the film on PBS so she can reach more people with Wong’s story, but she needs $20,000 just to pay for the licensing rights and insurance required by the network.

The public can help Hong get the documentary on public television. Hong is raising the funds through Kickstarter.com, and she’s raised two-thirds of her goal. She still needs about $6,000 to succeed, and that’s where you come in.

Read about the film on Kickstarter.com and donate — time is of the essence, since there are only six more days until the campaign ends. If she doesn’t raise the full amount, monies donated will be returned. So it’s all or nothing.

Give thanks for artists like Anna May Wong who helped paved the way for Asian American artists today — DONATE! The minimum amount is just a buck, but give more. There’s a list of great premiums you’ll get for giving various amounts. You’ll get a DVD of the film for $50, for instance, or a screening of the film in your hometown (US only) with Hong for $5000 or more. DONATE

Support Asian American filmmakers by donating through Kickstarter.com website

I’ve known about Kickstarter.com, the fundraising site for creative startups and projects in a variety of categories including film, art, dance, technology, design, journalism, comedy and others, but I’d never really looked into it. This week, though, I’ve come across several very cool films by Asian Americans that are using Kickstarter to ask for donations.

Here’s how it works:

Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors.

We believe that…

• A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
• A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.

Kickstarter is powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands.

Each project must set an amount needed and a deadline by which that amount must be raised. If you don’t get enough donations to reach the amount, you get none of the money that’s already been pledged. Each project offers different levels of thank-you gifts and rewards for donors, and donors can pledge as little as one dollar.

The submissions include a video pitch asking for donations, as well as written descriptions for the project. It’s a great way to generate crowd-sourced funding.

The three films I wrote about on my Posterous blog this week are all short films by Asian American filmmakers, and they’re all interesting ideas that I think are worth supporting. Here’s a little information about them, starting with the video at the top of this post, for “The Potential Wives of Norman Mao.”
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