Director: Christopher Makoto Yogi
Premiere: Jan. 29th 1:00 p.m.
Life, no matter how solitary the path we choose, is inevitably a grand catastrophe of collaboration. I Was a Simple Man follows Masao (
Steve Iwamoto and, in his younger years,
Tim Chiou) as he nears death in his lifelong home of Hawai‘i. As he hurdles toward his inevitable close, Masao’s life of exile (both self- and community-imposed) opens up into a florid portrait of his complicated personhood. Everything he could’ve known has changed beyond recognition, and the proceeding film balls up nearly a century’s worth of gratitude, regret, resentment and wonder into a visual poem that makes one man’s death the nexus for an exploration about what it means to be a father, a husband and a man in a land whose definition slips through your fingers day by day.