All tagged award-winning film

Chiemi Karasawa – Sacred Reciprocity | S5 E07

Chiemi Karasawa – Sacred Reciprocity | S5 E07

Katharine Heller

If you’ve seen Chiemi Karasawa’s award-winning film “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” you already know that Chiemi is a great storyteller. (If you haven’t, put it at the top of your streaming queue!) Chiemi's story is one filled with magic, mettle and a very healthy dose of hilarity. She landed one amazing job after another upon graduating from college: as script supervisor for lauded directors like Spike Jonze, Jim Jarmusch, Stephen Frears and Martin Scorsese, and then as an independent filmmaker and producer at Isotope Films, the company she founded in 2007. We were delighted by Chiemi’s “industry” stories, moved by her narration of her family's experience in and after the WW II Japanese American internment camps, and spellbound by her brief encounter with on-line dating, leading to her first marriage at 50 this past June. Chiemi likens herself to a “pioneer woman” in how she makes her way through life without a roadmap, on her own terms and relying on the cycle of giving with generosity and receiving with deep gratitude that fuels “sacred reciprocity.

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Kathy Brew - Unfurling Like A Spiral | S2 E06

Kathy Brew - Unfurling Like A Spiral | S2 E06

Katharine Heller

"Certainly I have felt many times that I’m hovering over an abyss. But you have to make that leap over to get to the other side."

Kathy Brew, 64, is a self-defined, label-defying “hybrid:” a documentary filmmaker, public television producer, curator, teacher, and artful dreamer. After college, she stumbled on her first job making educational filmstrips –remember those dreaded “hygiene” films in seventh grade? Then in the early 80s, she left New York for California with her first husband and began her work in media and the arts in San Francisco. When she got an unsolicited grant of $5,000 she made her first award-winning film, “Mixed Messages,” about girls and proscribed gender roles, the first of many of her arts and social issue documentaries. “Design Is One,” about the renowned designers Lella and Massimo Vignelli, is one of the more recent that Kathy made back in NYC with the “love of her life,” documentary filmmaker Roberto Guerra . Kathy envisioned finding a partner who would be her “best friend, lover and collaborator.” And she found that in her 17-year relationship with Roberto. Still in the deep sorrow of losing Roberto in 2014, Kathy also dreams and feeds her undaunted creative spirit. She’ll soon be traveling to Peru as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching and making art, and continuing to unfurl her “out-of-the-box,” full and free life.

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