R enee T ajima -P eña , series producer. Asian Americans

Since the 1970s, Asian American filmmakers have produced scores of personal documentaries examining the relationship between ethnic identity and collective memory. From personal stories of immigrant detainment on Angel Island, to family memories of Japanese American wartime incarceration during World War II, to lived experiences of Operation Babylift, filmmakers like Robert Nakamura, Felicia Lowe, Spencer Nakasako, Loni Ding, Rea Tajiri, Janice Tanaka, Christine Choy, and Deann Borshay Liem have produced documentaries reminding us that for so many Asian Americans the personal is almost always political. In her essay “Moving the Image: Asian American Independent Filmmaking 1970–1990,” filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña defines this Asian American cinema as “socially committed” (in Moving the Image Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts [1991], 12). Following the 1982 formation of the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (today the Center for Asian American Media), many of these socially committed Asian American documentaries found a national television audience

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