95 and 6 To Go: Professional Directions with filmmaker Kimi Takesue
This event will take place in the Film Forum at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. Free admission; 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 6 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.
PLEASE NOTE: This event will take place in the Film Forum at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. All are welcome!
Free admission! Sponsored by the Minority, Indigenous & Third World Studies Committee and the Department of Performing & Media Arts.
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.
“95 and 6 To Go is the home movie as subtle, multi-layered, self-reflexive work of art." - Peter Keough, The Boston Globe
“Stunning and profound, offering delicate reflections on life and cinema.” - Apolline Caron-Ottavi, The Montreal Gazette
"[An] extraordinary personal documentary...95 and 6 To Go is as light as a Nat King Cole song, but just as open to universes of feeling and memory... 95 and 6 To Go is a winner." - Brian Hu, San Diego Asian Film Festival
About the Speakers
Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker working in documentary, narrative, and experimental genres. She is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Film, the Rockefeller Fellowship in Media Arts, and the internationally competitive “Breakthrough Award” and fellowship from Chicken and Egg Pictures honoring women making significant contributions to the documentary field. Other honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Kodak Cinematography Fellowship, and grants from ITVS, Catapult Film Fund, New York State Council on the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Arts Council of England and artist fellowships from Yaddo (5x), MacDowell (5x), Marblehouse, Wexner Center for the Arts and Bogliasco.
In 2026, Takesue will receive a full retrospective of her films on the illustrious Criterion Channel. In 2025, she enjoyed her first mid-career retrospective in Asia at the esteemed Asian Film Archive in Singapore. Her films have screened extensively at festivals and museums internationally including Sundance, Locarno, New Directors/ New Films, Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Mar del Plata, SXSW, the Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and have aired on PBS, IFC, Comcast, and the Sundance Channel.
Jeffrey Palmer is an Associate Professor of Performing and Media Arts, a member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and is an award-winning filmmaker and media artist. He describes his work as a multimedia exploration of Indigenous people's lives in twenty-first century America. He recently completed the feature film, N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear, examining the life and mind of the first and only Native American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature. He is a member of the Directors Guild of America, International Documentary Association, Television Academy, and in 2022 completed the short narrative film Ghosts, which is chronicles Native American boarding schools in Oklahoma. He is currently working on the feature narrative script for his acclaimed short film Ghosts and he recently completed a film project for the new Obama Presidential Center in the Southside of Chicago.