Upcoming screenings:

SLAMDANCE” Unstoppable Program Screening Times for Wisdom Gone Wild:
Tues Jan 24 @6:20pm,
Weds Jan 25@ 3:20pm: Student Union Theater, Univ of Utah
Tues Jan 24 @ 10pm, Treasure Mountain Inn, Ballroom, PARK CITY
STREAM Wisdom Gone Wild on the SLAMDANCE CHANNEL During the Festival Jan 23-29th, (Pay for 1 month, Cancel @ anytime)
SEATTLE ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL, Feb 23- March 5
BERWICK FILM & MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL, Berwick-On-Tweed, UK, Sunday MARCH 5TH, 2023
DISORIENT OREGON ASIAN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL, MARCH 2023
IDFA, 2022, INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE, International Competition,
DOC NYC, American Lives Program, 2022
San Diego Asian Film Festival 2022; Winner Grand Jury Prize & Centerpiece Film
Philadelphia Asian American, 2022; Winner Audience Choice & Best Documentary Feature
Blackstar Film Festival, 2022, WORLD PREMIERE, Winner Audience Award & Jury Award, Honorable Mention: Best Feature Documentary

“..Without falling into self-centered trappings of nostalgic family documentaries, Wisdom is a patient meditation on life, time, and love, and a confrontation with monumental loss…Blurs the lines by which we define ourselves and the roles we play in love… a slow burn that singes but doesn’t sever.” -HYPERALLERGIC

“An intimate documentary film that engages the imagination to grapple with dementia and Japanese American history.”

-BOMB Magazine

“...a vérité portrait of a mother who, in her dementia, maintains a sense of humor, a stubborn autonomy, and occasionally a glimpse of who she once was…The complex dynamics of an immigrant family are revealed…”

-DOCUMENTARY MAGAZINE

“... instead of focusing on the frustration caregivers often go through, Tajiri offers hope through her use of improvisation and humor…a pathway to connection through listening, art and music.”

-NICHIBEI Times

“Wisdom Gone Wild, takes a radical new approach to telling the story of memory loss, one which rejects tragedy narratives and embraces joy.”

-CINESPEAK (Hansen Bursic)

Synopsis: In this moving and original reflection on mortality and transformation, Rea Tajiri partners with her mother, Rose Tajiri Noda, to create a film about the final sixteen years of Rose’s life as a person living with dementia. Together, they nurture their connection through listening, art, and music. Rose performs songs from her youth, providing the soundtrack for time travel, as we witness her evolution across nine decades of living. Delicately weaving between past and present, parenting and being parented, the film reflects on the unreliability of memory and the desire to reinvent one's own life when memories fail us. It is a poignant meditation on the abiding strength of the unique relationship between mothers and daughters.

Wisdom Gone Wild presents a daughter’s (Rea Tajiri) evolution towards a new way of seeing aging and mortality through her sixteen year journey as a care partner to her mother who lived with dementia. At 93, Rea’s mother, Rose Tajiri is a time traveler, a history keeper and a chronicler of Japanese American experience. Diagnosed with dementia at the age of 76, Rose’s non-chronological access to key historical events is cued through daily encounters and reminiscences.

This project was produced through generous support from : ITVS Diversity Development Fund, Center for Asian American Media Documentary Fund Award, a JustFilms/Ford Foundation Grant, an Independence Philadelphia Media Fund production grant, and funding from Temple University Vice Provost’s Research Grant. With additional support from the Leeway Transformation Award and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Our World Premier will be @ Blackstar Film Festival, Saturday August 6@3pm, Zellerbach Theater, Philadelphia! Check this website or sign up for our email contact list. Visit us on Facebook or Instagram (@wisdomgonewildfilm.com)

About the filmmaker:

Rea Tajiri is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and educator who creates installation, documentary and experimental films. Her work situates itself in poetic, non-traditional storytelling forms to encourage dialog and reflection around buried histories. Her 2018 multisite installation WATARIDORI- was a collage across time and space, that activates real and speculative histories of the Japanese Americans who arrived in Philadelphia from US concentration camps during World War II. LORDVILLE her film from 2014 reins in stories of the everyday — powerful floods, ancestral secrets and colonial violence — to probe the material and immaterial traces of a town’s history. Her current feature documentary, WISDOM GONE WILD, explores a person-centered approach to caregiving during her sixteen year journey as a care partner to her mother who lived with dementia. Tajiri has received support for her work through CAAM, ITVS, Independence Media Fund, JustFilms/Ford Foundation, The Leeway Foundation and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, NYFA and the Pew Foundation. She was awarded residencies from Fogo Island Arts, MacDowell Colony and Smack Mellon. She is currently an Associate Professor of Film at Temple University.