Christopher Makoto Yogi
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Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 5 (Vadim Rizov): I Was a Simple Man, The Blazing World
Sundance 2021 offered two case studies in the anxiety of influence, or lack thereof—neither film’s particularly worried about covering its tracks. Hawai’ian director Christopher Makoto Yogi’s I Was a Simple Man is a logical progression from his first feature, 2018’s August at Akiko’s, which climaxed by layering a Mulholland Drive riff (a sax player soloing inside an empty cave with no audience) on top of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (said shot of cave models its angle and lighting directly on Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s climactic setup). But August at Akiko’s told an essentially simple, literally meditative story about atmospherically re-immersing oneself at home after a long […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 3, 2021 -
Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 2 (Abby Sun): I Was a Simple Man, Strawberry Mansion, Cryptozoo
The Sundance Institute has been running producer and director labs since 1981, even before taking over and renaming the former US/Utah Film Festival in 1985. In that sense, the projects coming out of the Feature Film Program (whose founding director, Michelle Satter, is still in charge), Indigenous Program and Documentary Film Program are just as important a marker of Sundance’s effect on the US film ecosystem as the platform provided by the festival. When I programmed film festivals, I tracked their press releases as closely as official lineup announcements. This year, 16 projects in the festival were officially supported by […]
by Abby Sun on Jan 31, 2021 -
“My Collaborators Are Geniuses”: Editor Christopher Makoto Yogi on I Was a Simple Man
Set in the countryside of O’Ahu, Hawai’i, Director Christopher Makoto Yogi’s second feature film I Was a Simple Man is a surreal portrait of an elderly man’s final days. Told in chapters, the film follows Masao (Steve Iwamoto) as he’s visited by ghosts of his past, including his wife Grace (Constance Wu). Acting as the editor for his film, Yogi discusses staying true to his initial emotion in writing the film, as well as the value of brutal honesty in your team. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 30, 2021 -
“It Was as if the Film Had Given Us Permission to Connect”: Director Christopher Makoto Yogi | I Was a Simple Man
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? I Was a Simple Man is a film that is inspired by my personal experiences with death in the family, and the making of the film was a way for me to confront and process these experiences. But one of the most unanticipated aspects of developing our film was that whenever someone would read the script or listen to me speak about the film, folks would immediately tell me a story about someone dear […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 29, 2021 -
Christopher Makoto Yogi at the Sundance Directors Lab
Hawai’i-born director Christopher Makoto Yogi is at the Sundance Directors Lab with his feature, I Was a Simple Man. “Like marionettes on a toy stage, the ghosts of Seiichi’s past haunt the countryside in this tale of a Hawai’i family facing the imminent death of their eldest,” is how its described by the Sundance Institute. Below, Yoti describes leaving the Labs and finding quiet time — but missing the experience. Read Part One of Yogi’s diary here. The final night of the Directors and Screenwriters Labs went something like this: fellows, advisors and staff roved up to a mountain house […]
by Christopher Makoto Yogi on Jul 3, 2015
