Event
Ainu: Indigenous People of Japan
3260 South St, Philadelphia, PA
Join us for a screening of the documentary film Ainu: Indigenous People of Japan, which captures the lives of the Ainu people in their town of Biratori in Hokkaido and the efforts of the communities’ elders to keep their culture alive.
Following the screening, Professor Julia Alekseyeva will moderate a Q&A with filmmaker Naomi Mizoguchi.
Featured Speakers
Julia Alekseyeva is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in 2017 from Harvard University’s Department of Comparative Literature, with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies, and has taught at Harvard and Brooklyn College. Prior to her appointment at Penn, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. She researches the interactions between global media and radical leftist politics. Her work is fundamentally comparative and transnational, and delves into the film, comics, television, and digital media of Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union.
Naomi Mizoguchi founded GARA FILMS in 2014. Naomi, who started her career in Japan and moved to the United States in 2004, has 20-plus years of experience in video production. She has directed and/or edited more than 300 productions for commercial and independent companies, broadcasting networks, and government and community organizations. Her work has been broadcast in the U.S. on HBO and PBS and in Japan on NHK, the public broadcasting network.