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PBS Short Film Festival 2023
In the late 70s, when L.A.’s punk rock scene was exploding, an unlikely family-owned restaurant in Little Tokyo started by Japanese Americans returning from America’s WWII concentration camps, became a popular hang-out. That’s when Atomic Nancy with her “take-no-prisoners” punk make-up and demeanor took the café over from her parents and cranked up the jukebox. Infamous for its eclectic clientele, the Atomic Café became an important part of L.A.’s punk rock history.
AKIRA BOCH is an Emmy-Winning filmmaker and the Director of the Watase Media Arts Center at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. He has an MFA in Directing from the UCLA School of Film, TV, and Digital Media, and has made over 50 short films, documentaries, and music videos.
Emmy-winning filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura was named one of CNN’s “Young People Who Rock'' for being the youngest filmmaker at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and listed as one of the “Top Rising Asian American Directors” on IMDb. His recent films, Mele Murals and Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings, were on PBS.
Founded in 1980 the San Francisco-based Center for Asian American Media, formerly known as the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA), has grown into the largest organization dedicated to the advancement of Asian Americans in independent media, specifically the areas of television and filmmaking. CAAM’s inception at the beginning of the 1980s came at a key moment in the historical development of Asian American media. Earlier, in 1971, Los Angeles-based activists and artists established Visual Communications (VC), a community-based organization which was instrumental in helping to create many early examples of Asian American filmmaking, including the first Asian American feature film, Hito Hata: Raise the Banner in 1980. In New York, Asian CineVision (ACV) formed in 1976 and pursued similar goals as VC, helping to nurture a nascent East Coast filmmaking community.
