“Where Exactly Does Consent Live?” Rea Tajiri on Wisdom Gone Wild

Rea Tajiri’s Wisdom Gone Wild takes a hard look at a difficult subject. Tajiri’s 93-year-old mom Rose is a witness to the US’s dark concentration camp history, having been incarcerated along with the rest of her Nikkei farming family during the Second World War. Primarily through Rose’s engaging tales, alongside home video and family photos, Tajiri goes (and takes us) on a decade-plus, nonlinear cinematic journey— neatly paralleling Rose’s own thought process, as the veteran filmmaker’s mom began her dementia decline at the age of 76 — or should I say, dementia “reinvention.” For far from being a tragic story about “losing” one’s mind, Wisdom Gone Wild is actually a celebration of life in all its remarkable phases, as both Tajiri and her mother have decided to embrace the new woman Rose is forever transforming herself into, an identity complete with different surname and metaphorical past, Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” in perpetual motion. Just prior to the doc’s November 20th airing on POV, Filmmaker reached out to the multi-award-winning director (History and Memory, Strawberry Fields) and interdisciplinary artist, whose choice to put her career on hold to care for her main character seems to have paid off in spades.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.