Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Moving Forward by Stepping Back

Most of the past year has been spent working on helping to tell the story of what has been happening in Japan since March 11, 2011. Rightly so, everything I had been doing up until March 11 was put on hold and all of my energy and time was put into filming in Tohoku.

One of the consequences of that is that I put on hold the promotion of a documentary I finished in 2010 that had just begun to be shown in competition in international film festivals. "Jake, not finished yet" (81 min, UK/ Japan/ 2010) held its World Premier in competition at the Visions du Reel International Documentary Film Festival in Nyon, Switzerland in 2010 and its North American Premier at the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival that same year.

Now that we have passed the one-year anniversary of March 11, I feel that a veil has lifted; that a period of mourning has passed; that it is finally OK to continue to do other work as well.

It is not that I have "moved on" or will cease to continue to help tell the story of the victims of March 11. It is simply that I am moving forward, and by doing so I now feel the freedom to take a step back and awaken something that is so personal and close to my heart and has since last year been so quietly, patiently waiting in the background.


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