My America: Honk If You Love Buddha with Rene Tajima-Peña
Friday, 4:15 pm, Regal Downtown #3
Director: Rene Tajima-Peña
Writer: Renee Tajima-Peña
Cinematographer: Christine Choy, Jim Mulryan, and Nancy Schreiber
Running Time: 90 min
The award-winning 1997 documentary My America … or Honk If You Love Buddha is former Village Voice film critic Renee Tajima-Peña’s delightful, irreverent, and thought-provoking road trip in search of Asian American identity.
With Victor Wong—a Beat Generation actor, painter, and journalist immortalized in Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur—as her spiritual guide, director Tajima-Peña undertakes a cross-country road trip to explore the diversity of today’s Asian American communities. The film features eighth-generation Filipinos in Louisiana; Korean American rappers in Washington, D.C.; Japanese American activists in Mississippi; and South Asian gay and lesbian activists, among many others. Throughout her journey, Tajima-Peña examines post-World War II history, including the Beat Generation, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War, from the perspective of Asian American participants, even as she discusses how porous and unstable the concept of an “Asian American identity” can be.
Winner of the Eastman Kodak Award at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, Tajima-Peña’s transcontinental odyssey challenges viewers to take a fresh look at the past, present, and future of America’s so-called “invisible minority.”
Skate Manzanar, a six-minute video from 2001, will precede the main feature. Described by Tajima-Peña as “a meditation on skateboarding and civil liberties,” the project brings a contemporary skateboarder to the site of a WWII Japanese internment camp.
