A vibrant tender cine-poem, a filmmaker collaborates with her Nisei mother as they confront the painful curious reality of wisdom ‘gone wild’ in the shadows of dementia. Made over 16 years, the film blends humor and sadness in an encounter between mother and daughter that blooms into an affectionate portrait of love, care, and a relationship transformed. Produced in association with CAAM.
Filmmaker Rea Tajiri explores the painful, touching, and surprising realities of caring for her aging mother. Through old photographs, interviews, and personal recollections, Rea pieces together her mother Rose’s life story over 16 years and a dementia diagnosis in POV’s Wisdom Gone Wild. Premiering premiering 11/20 at 10pm (check local listings) on PBS. Stream it here: https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/wisdomgonewild/
In this moving and original reflection on mortality and transformation, Rea Tajiri partners with her mother, Rose Tajiri Noda, to create a film about the final sixteen years of Rose’s life as a person living with dementia. Together, they nurture their connection through listening, art, and music. Rose performs songs from her youth, providing the soundtrack for time travel, as we witness her evolution across nine decades of living. Delicately weaving between past and present, parenting and being parented, the film reflects on the unreliability of memory and the desire to reinvent one's own life when memories fail us. It is a poignant meditation on the abiding strength of the unique relationship between mothers and daughters.
Rea Tajiri is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist who received her BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Post-Studio Art. Her films explore the psycho-spiritual dimensions of family, time, place and history. Rea's films have screened in international venues such as the Fukuoka International Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Toronto Reel Asian, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Punta de Vista, Videotage, and the Yamagata Documentary Festival. Her work has also been included in several Whitney Biennials. Rea's essay documentary short History and Memory is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and won an International Documentary Association's Distinguished Achievement Award. Her debut feature film Strawberry Fields won the Grand Prix at the Fukuoka Asian International Film Festival. Rea's current film Wisdom Gone Wild was awarded funding through CAAM, Independence Media Fund Philadelphia and ITVS. In 2015, Rea received a Pew Foundation Artist Fellowship and in 2021, she received the Leeway Transformation Award. Previously, she was awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Rea teaches documentary filmmaking and is an Associate Professor in the Film Media Arts Department at Temple University.
