The Tri-Co Asian American Studies Program and the Swarthmore College Department of Music present a screening of Omoiyari: A Song Film, followed by a Q&A and live performance by musician and filmmaker Kishi Bashi. This event will take place in the Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema on Swarthmore College Campus.

Kishi Bashi is the pseudonym of singer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Kaoru Ishibashi. Born in Seattle, Washington, Ishibashi grew up in Norfolk, Virginia where both of his parents were professors at Old Dominion University. As a 1994 graduate of Matthew Fontaine Maury High School, he went on to study film scoring at Berklee College of Music before becoming a renowned violinist. Ishibashi has recorded and toured internationally as a violinist with diverse artists such as Regina Spektor, Sondre Lerche, and most recently, the Athens, Georgia-based indie rock band, of Montreal. He remains based in Athens.

A Song Film By Kishi Bashi: “Omoiyari,” the feature-length motion picture co-directed by Ishibashi and Justin Taylor Smith was released via MTV Documentary Films in theaters on October 6th. Focusing on Ishibashi’s own six-year journey of discovery surrounding his research of the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the film is part social justice documentary and part song-film experiment.

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