Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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Fumikomi explores the question of remembrance during a time of ecological collapse. Set in an apocalyptic vision of northern Chicago, two Japanese-Taiwanese sisters face the intangible death of culture across their family’s generations while packing their belongings to escape an imminent flood. Upon finding a box of their mother’s journals in the basement, Fumiko and Hana must face not only the grief of their mother’s passing, but the grief of lost languages.
Fumiko, the older sister, holds a complex of contradictory feelings: the failed cultural duty to know the Japanese language, informed by her past resentment of her mother. Trying to make up for her absence in the 30 minutes they have to evacuate, Fumiko must decide which of her mother’s untranslated journals to take.
Hana, the younger one, had a closer relationship with their mother, and therefore learned more of the language. Not quite fluent, she gets pressured by Fumiko to figure out what the mountain of writings say. This results in a fight that unveils their mother’s loss of the Taiwanese language, unfolding like a Russian nesting doll.
Fumikomi is a small-scale story within a large-scale context. The audience may sit down thinking it is a genre story, but eventually find something deeper. On its surface, it’s a dramatic, apocalypse film sprinkled with some sibling humor. But underneath, it’s a film about borders, climate change, diaspora, and displacement. After the film sets the real-world stakes of the evacuation and impending flood, we are faced with the existential question: How do you preserve cultural lineage when everything is lost?
In 30 minutes, Fumiko and Hana must pack everything important to them in one bag. Under these pressurized circumstances, the sisters are left with belongings from a mother they’ve lost. What objects do they leave with, if any? What do they discover about themselves that can only be found in her absence? The answers to these questions lie in a long history of cultural suppression, from both America and Japan.
Chicago was a popular resettlement location for Japanese Americans after the WWII concentration camps. Most families were restricted to “buffer zones”, neighborhoods in- between Black and white neighborhoods to adhere to redlining. I think of Fumiko and Hana to be descendants of this migration, coming from a family historically displaced by the state, and undergoing further fracturing from the approaching flood. This film shines a spotlight on a lesser known mixed-ethnic Nikkei population, while creating something for the wider intergenerational, immigrant audiences who are searching for a form of emotional refuge.
As of August 11th, this project has raised $9,100 of their $10,000 goal. This project has 3 days left to raise the $10,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $25, you will get a digital poster. For a pledge of $50, you will get your name in the credits. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/asuka/fumikomi-a-short-film?
