Here is a PARKING MAP. Parking onsite is paid parking, please plan accordingly!
Dress code is business! See you all there!
The Raval family, from left Daisy, Matthew, Jeffrey, Sophia and Dude, wearing their Wolf Ears. Jeffrey Raval was the 2015 CDBF Honorary Patron and his company, Raval Facial Aesthetics, is sponsoring “Wolf Children.”
“Wolf Children” is a Japanese anime feature film from director Mamoru Hosoda (“Summer Wars”), based on a traditional Japanese folktale. This epic cinematic achievement follows Hana, a woman who falls in love with a Wolf Man and gives birth to two half human, half wolf children. After the tragic death of her beloved, Hana seeks refuge in a rural town where she attempts to build a life for herself and her children.
Your kids can come early before the screening to make their very own Wolf Ears for free, just like the ones worn by the Raval family above!
Ken Ochiai, the director of our Opening Night film, “Uzumasa Limelight,” will attend both the Friday night VIP Reception and Opening Night screening as well as the 5 pm Saturday showing of the film, to talk about the movie.
Ochiai made his first film at age 12. Immediately following his high school graduation, he left his hometown of Tokyo, Japan, to pursue his dream of becoming a film director in the United States.
To date, Ochiai has directed three theatrical features and over 30 short films, commercials, and music videos. His first feature film, “Tiger Mask” (based on a legendary Japanese comic book series), was released in the fall of 2013 in several Asian countries.
His second feature film, “Uzumasa Limelight,” was released in 2014. It won the Chevel Noir (Best Picture) and for Best Actor at the Fantasia International Film Festival, the Crystal Heart Award at the Heartland Film Festival, two audience awards at the New York Asian Film Festival, and Camera Japan in Holland.
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NOTE: This film will be screened as part of the Colorado Dragon Film Festival in Denver on Sunday, May 22 at 12:00 noon. Click here for tickets.
You’d think after a lifetime of growing and harvesting peaches, you’d get sick of eating them. But the Masumoto family still loves peaches and serves them up every way imaginable. David “Mas” Masumoto, 62, the farmer who has nurtured his parents’ peach groves, says “Actually no. I love peaches, almost literally in my blood.”
Nikiko Masumoto, his daughter, adds, “We have 10 varieties and each has a window of ripeness for two weeks. So it’s like getting to see your best friends for two weeks out of the year.”
The father-and-daughter interaction is central to the delightful dynamics of “Changing Season: On the Masumoto Family Farm,” a documentary by director Jim Choi. The film follows the two, as well as the farm’s matriarch, Marcy and Nikiko’s brother Korio, through a transitional year not only in the farm but in the family’s life.
The Masumoto Family Farm, which produces nectarines and raisins in addition to peaches, was purchased and first tilled by Mas’ father, Takashi “Joe” Masumoto, in 1948. The family had returned to California’s Central Valley after spending World War II in a concentration camp in Arizona along with thousands of other Japanese American families.
Mas wasn’t planning on following in his father’s footsteps. He attended the University of California at Berkeley in the early 1970s, thinking he’d escaped the sweat and labor. “I studied something that I thought would never bring me back to the farm: Sociology, he says. “But it got me to study how a plant grows and everything around the peach” – the whole community of people and processes that produce the fruit.
He ended up embracing the sociology of farming as part of the ecosystem that connected humans to the Earth. And maybe Cal helped lead Mas to be an early adopter of organic farming.
“When I was growing up it was somewhat conventional. At the time fertilizers and pesticides were expensive. When we were transitioning to organics, I relied on my father’s experience of farming. It was much simpler.”
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Join us, for our First Annual Colorado Dragon Film Festival
as we celebrate Asian and Asian-American cinema.
