ITVS contracted with Every Day Is a Holiday! Here’s the link. Sachi Schuricht (who made a great documentary about speedcubing) interviewed me: http://beyondthebox.org/newly-contracted-itvs-announces-funding-for-every-day-is-a-holiday/

I’m so thrilled to have the support of ITVS and my station partner, Kentucky Educational Television (KET). Stay tuned for local and national television broadcast dates!

The only catch is that I still need to raise a remaining $23600, to close my funding gap. These funds are needed to cover expenses such as post-production (ex : sound design, graphic animation, color correction), archival licensing and promotion/outreach. You can help me bridge that gap in three ways:

1) make a tax-deductible charitable donation through this Women Make Movies link:
http://www.wmm.com/filmmakers/sponsored_projects.shtml#473

2) introduce me to friends or partners who could be interested in supporting the project

3) encourage people to like my page on FB

As you may know, this adventure has been going on for a number of years. I am in the “home stretch” and I am very grateful for your support and generosity.

Join our roster of donors!

Thank you.

The palindrome has been vanquished!

As you know, the Independent Television Service (ITVS) has green-lit our film and will provide $79,000 towards the completion of the film if we can raise the revised number of $34,496. A big, big thank you to donors who provided an end-of-year push.

Now, we will be raising some of these funds through a crowd-sourcing web site called KICKSTARTER.

Help us meet the challenge! And score tickets to the premiere, an exclusive interview from the director, your name in the credits, and more!

And a big thanks to Annie Li! Annie is a student at Harvard and participated in this year’s January Experience program, since Harvard now has exams prior to winter break. She was instrumental in the launch of the Kickstarter campaign. Annie also created a documentary about the effects of the earthquake in Sichuan, China. Laura Wu is also helping with the campaign; I’ll introduce her in a later post.

A secret diary. My father is celebrating his 65th year of freedom from a World War II prison-of-war camp.

Recently, I discovered a secret diary my father kept while he was a teenage prisoner-of-war in Japan. This film documents a story of triumph over adversity, showing major historical events through a deeply personal lens using interviews, rare archival footage, and my father’s wartime diary. Each chapter in this layered story begins with a quote from my father’s diary, visually rendered in his elegant penmanship. The film structure mirrors the old-fashioned television and radio “chapter plays.”

Like a real-life Zelig, my father was there: from purchasing opium in Malaysia, to sailing to Iran as a merchant seaman, to driving a tank over exploding kim chee vats in Korea. My father believed that since he survived the horrors that surrounded him as a POW, then every day held potential for joy, making every day a holiday.

Won’t you join us in this journey?