September 29, 2022
7:00pm (Eastern Time)
Alumni Hall, 7th Floor Auditorium
The Japan Council of the University of Pittsburgh and SCREENSHOT: ASIA are pleased thrilled to announce that Mizuko Yamaoka's Maelstrom is the 2022 winner of the JDFA! Maelstrom is Yamaoka’s story of “loss and rebirth” due to a drastic life change from a car accident that damaged her cervical vertebrae. A profoundly humanist tale of tragedy and rebirth, Yamaoka's intimate documentary is both a telling of her own losses and a portrait of human experience. The film will be screened with the filmmaker in attendance as part of the second SCREENSHOT: Asia Film Festival. The award ceremony will take place on September 29 at 7pm in the Seventh Floor Auditorium of Alumni Hall, immediately followed by the screening of the film.
Established by Pitt’s Japan Council to recognize exemplary documentary films promoting the understanding of Japan and Japanese culture, the University of Pittsburgh Japan Documentary Film Award is supported by generous endowments from Japanese donors to promote Japan Studies and deepen cross-cultural understanding at the University of Pittsburgh and across the region. The 2020 Grand Prize was presented to Tokachi Tsuchiya for An Ant Strikes Back, which showcases an employee’s fight to keep his job in the face of routine abuse and cruel working conditions at a large-scale moving company, and an Honorable Mention was awarded to Nanako Hirose for book-paper-scissors, a contemplative look at book publication through the craftsmanship of veteran book designer Nobuyoshi Kikuchi. This year’s committee was led by Pitt film professor Robert Clift, known for his acclaimed documentary Making Montgomery Clift (2018), and documentary filmmaker Kazuhiro Soda, recipient of the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival for Zero (2020).
To get tickets for this screening, please visit this link: https://screenshot2022.eventive.org/schedule/6319fd3fa2e73b37381ee0b7.
About the Film
In the early summer of 2002, Mizuko Yamaoka had an accident just after graduating from the art college where in NY, in which she suffered a serious injury that left her unable to move her leg. She was forced to return to Japan, all of her previous contacts were cut off, and her path to becoming active in the international art world while living outside of Japan was closed. Without being able to change her limited environment, artistic creation became more and more a thing of the past. In order to reconnect with herself, Yamaoka decided to make a film about her experience and the people around her. A profoundly humanist tale of tragedy and rebirth, Ms. Yamaoka's intimate documentary is both a telling of her own losses and a portrait of human experience.
About the Director
Born in Tokyo, Japan. In 1998, moved to New York, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute (NY, USA). After graduating from college, she was forced to return to Japan due to a traffic accident in which her legs were paralyzed. After a lengthy hospitalization, she began working for the secretariat of a non-profit organization working for the disabled. While later staying in Denmark, she studied filmmaking and editing. After returning to Japan, she continued her studies at the Film School of Tokyo, focusing on documentary film. In 2016, she directed and screened a short independent documentary, “The Lost Coin,” which was filmed in Barcelona. That same year, she began recording her life in a wheelchair. In spring-summer 2021, she participated in the artist residency program at BankART AIR (Yokohama, Japan). Five years after she began documenting her life, she completed her first feature-length documentary, Maelstrom, in January 2022.