This year Doc Fortnight honors the work of Bay Area filmmaker Emiko Omori with a selection of her films. Omori’s work has been featured in many festivals and broadcast on public television, but is less known here on the East Coast. In 2016, she was among a select group of documentary filmmakers invited to join the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
When Rabbit Left the Moon. 2017. USA. Directed by Emiko Omori. 14 min.
World theatrical premiere
Omori created this video poem from footage and outtakes from Rabbit in the Moon. “In 2017,” she says, “I commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of my incarceration at the age of one by my government, the United States of America.” When Rabbit Left the Moon is an elegy to her parents’ generation—the Issei (immigrants)—and the legacy of suffering that haunts the community to this day.
To Chris Marker, An Unsent Letter. 2012. USA. Directed by Emiko Omori. 78 min.
New York premiere
Omori was a personal friend of the late Chris Marker, the French filmmaker and artist best known for his films La Jetée and Sans Soleil. This film, a kind of love letter/homage to Marker, is a contemplative essay that honors and echoes his artistic style. In addition to Omori’s thoughts and recollections, and a look at some of Marker’s major works, the film includes interviews with other admirers, including film programmers Tom Luddy and Peter Scarlet, and 12 Monkeys screenwriters Janet and David Peoples, summing up the legacy of a filmmaker who was both elusive and beloved. An Icarus Films release