Video: A Glimpse of an award-winning documentary directed by a Tanzanian-Korean filmmaker – Eliaichi Kimaro

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJRxe2U3if4

Seattle-based filmmaker Eliaichi “Ellie” Kimaro is a mixed-race, first-generation American with a Tanzanian father and Korean mother. When Ellie was older and in an interracial relationship of her own, she wanted to better understand this world her father had left behind when he was 18. So when Dr. Kimaro moved back to Tanzania for good, Ellie followed him to make a film about this culture she would one day pass down to her kids.

What Ellie discovered on that trip – in Tanzania, in her family and in herself – is the subject of this personal award-winning documentary, A Lot Like You. As both a cultural insider and outsider, Ellie asked questions that most people who grew up on Mt Kilimanjaro would never think to ask. Much to Ellie’s surprise, the stoic women in her family opened up, telling her stories about trauma and survival that they’d never even shared with each other as sisters.

And so Ellie must reconcile this culture she’s inherited with how she defines herself today–as a woman, as an activist and, perhaps most of all, as a mother. And in doing so, she finds a way to translate her father’s Chagga culture into her own personal legacy. A Lot Like You was named Best Documentary at the 30th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. A portion of the net proceeds from the film will help fund the construction of a girls’ dormitory at the Vunjo Secondary School in the Kimaro family village of Mwika.

Visit her site for more info: http://alotlikeyoumovie.com