02. From Japan: July 2005 Archives

On Thursday, October 14th, 2004, I attended a screening of Trinh T. Minh-ha's latest work, Night Passage, at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The event also included a lecture and discussion session with Professor Ryūta Imafuku (Cultural Anthropology, Sapporo University) and Professor Narihiko Nishi (Comparative Literature, Ritsumeikan University). Through a variety of art forms - film, poetry, music, writing - Minh-ha has explored the problem of plural identities from postcolonial and feminist perspectives. She draws on her own personal experience, being born in Vietnam, and having studied in France and the U.S., and taught in Senegal. She now teaches film theory at UCLA, Berkeley. My reason for attending this event was because I am particularly interested in the boundaries between film - particularly fiction - and documentary, so I wanted to learn more about Minh-ha, a film artist who is not bound to one genre.