"Harimaya Bridge"

NEWSFLASH!  “Harimaya Bridge” will be opening Friday, April 23rd at the Regal Dole Cannery Theaters for a one-week limited engagement.

While most people on the island were settling down in front of their TVs amidst a sea of Super Bowl snacks, braving the Chinese New Year crowds in Chinatown, or recuperating from Punahou Carnival malasada binges, I joined a group of about 100 fellow film enthusiasts in a lecture hall on the UH-Manoa campus.

We were privileged to attend a screening of a film that previously opened in last summer in  theaters in Japan, “The Harimaya Bridge,"co-sponsored by the Consulate General of Japan, the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, and the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i.

 

Director/Screenwriter Aaron Woolfolk and Professor of Anthropology at UH-Manoa Dr. Christine Yano lead a panel discussion after the film, taking questions and comments from the audience. Aaron is an Oakland, California native and a fellow Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program alumnus and I found that many of the scenes of “inaka Kochi” echoed those in my memories of Saga. After graduating from the University of California Berkeley with degrees in Ethnic Studies and Rhetoric, Aaron spent a year teaching English in Japan before returning to the U.S. to earn an M.F.A. in Film with an emphasis in Directing from Columbia University. His thesis project consisted of two short films about Mickey, an African-American JET teacher in Kochi: “Eki (The Station)” and “Kuro Hitsuji (Black Sheep)”. Three of the characters in “Harimaya Bridge”: Mickey, Noriko, and Emi also appeared in “Kuro Hitsuji”.

Aaron’s current projects include “Summer Solstice”, a comedy-drama about a summer festival in a small town in Louisiana, and second film that is a sort of reverse-“Harimaya”, in which a Japanese man has a dream about opening a jazz bar in New Orleans.

For more information on “Harimaya Bridge” and Aaron, see the film’s official website at http://www.theharimayabridge.com/

Yoko Mae (Researcher, Public Information and Cultural Affairs Section, Consulate General of Japan in Honolulu), Dr. Robert Huey (Director, Center for Japanese Studies, UH-Manoa), Director Aaron Woolfolk, Dr. Christine Yano (Professor, Department of Anthropolgy, UH-Manoa), Jennifer Seki (Volunteers Coordinator, Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i).