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Filmmaker to Speak at Utica College

Award-Winning Producer, Director to Speak on Documentary

Written By Keith Henry '08, Communications Assistant

Contact - cleogrande@utica.edu

Utica, NY (11/17/2008) - She met him on the streets of Lower Manhattan where he lived and worked. He was 85 years old and homeless in the conventional sense. But Jimmy Mirikitani is a citizen of the world and his home is wherever he creates his art. His physical world has been ripped asunder many times through the years and Mirikitani’s journey intersected with some of the seminal moments of human history.

Filmmaker Linda Hattendorf brings the poignancy of Mirikitani’s life and improbable odyssey to the screen in her award-winning documentary The Cats of Mirikitani. The film will be screened Thursday, Nov. 20 at Utica College’s Strebel Auditorium at 7 p.m. Following the film, Hattendorf will lead a discussion about the film. The screening is free and open to the public.

Born in Sacramento and raised in Hiroshima, Japan, Mirikitani returned to the U.S. to pursue a career in art in the late 1930s. But after the outbreak of WWII, Mirikitani and 120,000 other Americans of Japanese descent were sent to internment camps for the duration of the war; a war that saw Mirikitani’s ancestral home vaporized by an atomic bomb and his American family split up and sent to different internment camps. His travails eventually led him to New York and, sadly, after the death of his employer, onto the streets where he sold his art to survive.

Hattendorf met the artist in January of 2001 and began filming their interactions. She told a PBS interviewer what she hoped the film would show. “I wanted to explore the link between losing homes in such a profound way in the past and ending up on the streets 60 years later. When 9/11 happened in the midst of shooting, the layers of history repeating itself made his stories all the more relevant,” she said.

The event is part of the Film@UC series and is co-sponsored by the Clark Chair for Human Rights Advocacy and Scholarship, the Utica College Womyn’s Resource Center and the Campus Theme Committee.

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