All tagged producer

Sonoko Sakai – Salary Woman No More! | S6 E06

What are we talking about when we talk about “reinventing” ourselves? Our conversation with writer, teacher and Japanese home cooking guru, Sonoko Sakai, reveals how failure is a pathway to discovering long-standing passions and new opportunities. After two decades as a successful film buyer and producer, Sonoko confronted financial and career loss. To heal, she discovered “putting my hands in flour was the most therapeutic way.”

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Chiemi Karasawa – Sacred Reciprocity | S5 E07

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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