ALL IS WELL PICTURES IN ASSOCIATION WITH FORD FOUNDATION, AND SCANDOBEAN PRODUCTIONS PRESENT
Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes
Language: English
Rating: Not Rated
Genre: Documentary Feature
County: USA
Director: Jennifer Takaki
Executive Producers: George and Hillary Hirose, Lily M. Fan
Producers: Jennifer Takaki, Linda Lew Woo
Co-Producers: David Koh, Nicole DiMiceli
Editor: Linda Hattendorf
PHOTOGRAPHIC JUSTICE: The Corky Lee Story, will open theatrically in New York THIS WEEK on April 19 (DCTV's Firehouse Cinema) and in Los Angeles (Laemmle Glendale) NEXT WEEK on April 26, with a regional expansion to follow.
The film will also have a nationwide US television release, premiering Monday, May 13 at 10/9C on PBS (check local listings) and on PBS apps to follow, timed to Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month May, 2024.
For 50 years, Chinese American photographer and New Yorker Corky Lee documented the celebrations, struggles, and daily lives of Asian American Pacific Islanders with epic focus. Determined to push mainstream media to include AAPI culture in the visual record of American history, Lee produced an astonishing archive of nearly a million compelling photographs. Jennifer Takaki’s intimate portrait reveals the triumphs and tragedies of the man behind the lens.
Corky Lee was born in 1947 in New York to Chinese immigrants who owned two laundries in Queens. He majored in history at Queens College and became a community organizer in Manhattan’s Chinatown in the 1970s. Over the next five decades he photographed countless protests and cultural events in the Asian American Pacific Islander community. Lee’s photographs documented the birth and growth of the Asian American movement for social justice and he became known as “The Undisputed, Unofficial, Asian American Photographer Laureate.” His death in 2021 at the age of 73 due to Covid was mourned in the press worldwide.
Filmmaker Jennifer Takaki is a fourth generation Japanese American from Colorado. She began her career in journalism at a Denver TV station and later moved to Hong Kong to work with Encore International. In Hong Kong she produced English-based news programming broadcast in China, India, and the Middle East via Rupert Murdoch’s STAR-TV. In New York, she produced and directed “Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story” which premiered at DOC NYC and was supported by the Ford Foundation and The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM). She was awarded the prestigious Better Angels Lavine Fellowship in 2023.