Steven Okazaki

Steven Okazaki (born 1952 in Venice, California) is an American filmmaker. He is Sansei Japanese American (3rd generation) and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has received a Peabody Award and been nominated for three Academy Awards, winning an Oscar for the documentary short subject, "" (1990).

Career

Okazaki started at Churchill Films in 1976, making narrative and documentary shorts. In 1982 he produced "Survivors" for WGBH Boston, a documentary short about Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors. In 1985 he received his first Academy Award nomination for "Unfinished Business", about three Nisei Japanese Americans who challenged the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in court. In 1987 he wrote and directed the independent film, "Living on Tokyo Time", which premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival and was theatrically released by Skouras Pictures. In 1991 he won the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject for "Days of Waiting", about Estelle Ishigo, a Caucasian artist who went with her Japanese American husband to a World War II concentration camp for Japanese Americans. He continued to make documentary films for PBS and later with HBO. In 2006 he received his third Oscar nomination for "The Mushroom Club", a personal documentary about his journey to Japan to interview atomic bomb survivors on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Okazaki's production company, Farallon Films, is based in Berkeley, California.

Filmography

*"A-M-E-R-I-C-A-N-S" (1976)
*"Survivors" (1982)
*"The Only Language She Knows" (1983)
*"Unfinished Business" (1985)
*"Living on Tokyo Time" (1987)
*"Hunting Tigers" (1988)
*"" (1990)
*"Troubled Paradise" (1992)
*"The Lisa Theory" (1993)
*"American Sons" (1994)
*"" (1995)
*"Life Was Good" (1996)
*"" (1999)
*"The Fair" (2002)
*"Rehab" (2005)
*"The Mushroom Club" (2005)
*"" (2007)

External links

*
* [http://www.farfilm.com farallon films official site]
* [http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/americansons.html profile by Peter Feng at UC Berkeley Library] (1996/"American Sons")
* [http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sfmetro/04.12.99/okazaki-9913.html Okazaki interview on metroactive.com] (1999/"Black Tar Heroin")
* [http://japanfocus.org/products/details/1751 Okazaki article] from The Japan Times (2006/"The Mushroom Club")
* [http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2007/01/park_city_07_re_25.html Sundance review on indiewire] (2007/"White Light/Black Rain")