95 and 6 to Go with filmmaker Kimi Takesue

This event will take place in the Film Forum at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. All are welcome!

2025 Carol B. Epstein Visiting Artist in the Department of Performing and Media Arts

As part of the Department of Performing & Media Arts "Professional Directions" series, filmmaker Kimi Takesue will discuss her career and filmmaking process with Jeffrey Palmer, Associate Professor in the Department of Performing & Media Arts, alongside a free screening of her film 95 and 60 to Go (2018).

In 95 and 6 to Go, a resilient widower’s memories become intertwined with the fictional screenplay his granddaughter is writing, revealing the fine line between life and art, rumination and imagination.

Filmmaker Kimi Takesue captures the cadence of daily life for Grandpa Tom, a retired postal worker born to Japanese immigrants to Hawai’i in the 1910’s. Amidst the solitude of his home routines - coupon clipping, rigging an improvised barbecue, lighting firecrackers on the New Year - we glimpse an unexpectedly rich inner life. As his granddaughter queries his history of love and loss, a stalled film project becomes a collaborative inquiry into mortality and how one constructs a personal narrative with memories that span almost a century.

Shot over six years in Honolulu, this intimate meditation on absence and family expands the vernacular of the “home movie” to consider how history is accumulated in the everyday and how sparks of humor and creativity can animate an ordinary life.

NOTE: This event will take place in the Film Forum at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. All are welcome!

Please also join us at Cornell Cinema for a free screening of Where Are You Taking Me? on Tuesday, February 24, and a free screening of Onlookers on Thursday, February 26 as part of Looking and Seeing Across Cultures: The Films of Kimi Takesue.

Sponsored by the Minority, Indigenous & Third World Studies Committee and the Department of Performing & Media Arts.