"I have no memory of my direction" World Premiere

From: Sarah Muff (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Mar 03 2006 - 16:41:22 PST


TORONTO FILMMAKER MIDI ONODERA PREMIERES A NEW WORK FROM JAPAN

Praxis Centre for Screenwriters and Cineworks present Toronto
writer-director Midi Onodera (http://www.midionodera.com) with the world
premiere of her feature-length experimental narrative, I Have No Memory of
My Direction.

SCREENING: Saturday, March 4, 7:30 pm
SFU Harbour Centre Terasen Cinema
515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
ADMISSION: $8/$5 Praxis and Cineworks members + students (tix at door)
Q&A with director Midi Onodera to follow screening

The screening is presented in conjunction with Onodera's appearance at the
Society for Cinema & Media Studies international conference earlier in the
week.

I Have No Memory of My Direction unfolds through a Canadian-born Japanese
woman's voice-over as she dreams her way though Japan. Ostensibly searching
for an emotional connection with her aging father, the woman contemplates
her own inherited culture and familial touchstones. Her North American pop
culture sensibility fuses with a distorted Japanese perspective to create a
surreal interpretation of a "Japan of the imagination". As an entry point, I
Have No Memory of My Direction references Chris Marker's groundbreaking Sans
Soleil (1983) but moves into a fictional landscape, peppered with invented
Japanese myths, ruminations on memory loss, the temporal space of digital
photography and the ghosts of inherited imagination.

"Being a third-generation Japanese-Canadian, being a woman and being a
lesbian are all things about me that come together in my films. They all
have a personal edge." Midi Onodera

Onodera's previous work includes 25 independent short films, notably the
celebrated The Basement Girl and Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax), as well as a
theatrical feature, Skin Deep. Her productions are a collage of formats and
media ranging from 16mm. film to Hi8 and digital video, along with low
resolution toy cameras and computer-generated effects.

"A survey of the films she has produced in her 20-year career…reveals not
only a fierce filmmaking intelligence but also an eagerness to deal with
controversial subject matter." - Adam Nayman, Eye Weekly

Onodera's work has been screened in many prestigious festivals, including
Toronto, Berlin, Rotterdam and Bilbao. She was recently honoured with a
retrospective at Toronto's Reel Asian International Film Festival.

Midi Onodera's visit to Vancouver is made possible through the sponsorship
of CITY-TV and the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser
University.

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Sarah Muff
Cineworks Exhibitions and Outreach Coordinator
email suppressed
www.cineworks.ca
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.