It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since we premiered Jitensha at AFI.  We had big hopes for this film, but its success has definitely exceeded our expectations.  A year later, Jitensha is still picking up steam.

Last weekend, Jitensha picked up two awards:  Prix du Jury Jeune (Youth Jury Prize) from the Brussels Short Film Festival and the Golden Reel (Best Short Film) at Visual Communication’s Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.

The latter is especially meaningful because Leilani and I have been attending their festival since we were in our first year of film school.  It’s a place that showcases the best in Asian and Asian American cinema.  There are so many great Asian American works that are produced each year; sadly, many of them don’t get the recognition that they deserve, so festivals like LAAPFF have become an essential venue to celebrate the Asian American experience.

Visual Communications is an organization that I highly respect.  At their filmmaker’s breakfast, the first two people I met were Academy Award winners– and they were Asian American.  VC is close to many people’s hearts because of how they have nurtured and supported generations of Asian American filmmakers.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, Jitensha received two awards (best mixed video and best overall faculty video) from the Broadcast Education Association’s Festival of Media Arts in April.  At the awards ceremony in Las Vegas, they announced a new award that they were going to give to the best faculty submission, which ranged from such disciplines as screenwriting, audio, interactive media, documentary and video.  This inaugural award, which is called the Chair’s Award, was given to Jitensha.  Leilani and I were shocked.  It was amazing to be given this award by my fellow media educators from across the country.

In June, we have the Talent 1 Media Film Festival (LA), the Bicycle Film Festival (NYC),  the Arcipelago Film Festival (Rome, Italy) and Images That Matter Film Festival (Ethiopia).  We also just learned that Jitensha will screen at the Hawaii International Film Festival in October.  We got rejected from Hawaii last year, but the programming director Anderson Le saw Jitensha at LAAPFF and invited it to screen this year.  Just goes to show that anything can happen.

We continue to be grateful for all these things.  And congratulations to the team– the Biola students, Paul Nethercott and everyone at Studio Re:, Yu Shibuya and Yugo Saso.

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