FARALLON FILMS
Award-winning films by Steven Okazaki
BIOGRAPHY
STEVEN OKAZAKI
Steven Okazaki’s films explore a range of subjects - from nuclear war to drug addiction to pop culture in Japan to food-on-a-stick at the Minnesota State Fair. He is a four-time Academy Award® nominee and won the Oscar® in 1991 for DAYS OF WAITING, his film about artist Estelle Ishigo, the Caucasian half of a mixed couple imprisoned with the Japanese Americans during World War II. He is also the recipient of a Primetime Emmy for "Exceptional Merit in Non-Fiction Filmmaking,” a Peabody Award; Camerimage’s "Outstanding Achievement Award;” the Grand Prize from the Banff World Media Festival; the Grand Prix from the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, and the "Honorary Citizen Award” from the City of Hiroshima.
Born in Los Angeles in 1952, Steven grew up in Venice, California. After graduating from Venice High in 1970, he took art classes while working as a dishwasher, farm laborer, liquor store stock person, Montessori school bus driver and Veterans Administration file clerk, until making the decision to go to film school at San Francisco State University. After graduating in 1976, he produced and directed children’s films for Churchill Films in Los Angeles until the educational film market collapsed following the passage of California’s Prop 13 in 1978. He played in bands (including the infamous punk trio The Maids) and took P.A. jobs on industrials, commericials and at the local PBS station, before making his first PBS documentaries, SURVIVORS (1982) for WGBH Boston's “World” (now “Frontline”) and the Oscar® nominated UNFINISHED BUSINESS (1985), the story three men who challenged the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.
Encouraged by an American Film Institute Fellowship, he moved in a different direction with LIVING ON TOKYO TIME (1987), a low-budget comedy about a Japanese dishwasher’s green card marriage to a Japanese American slacker, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically by Skouras Pictures.
In 1992, following the Oscar® win, he made TROUBLED PARADISE, a look at native culture and activism on the Big Island of Hawai'i, after which he stopped producing films for PBS, frustrated with its conservatism and funding hurdles. Without national distribution, he made AMERICAN SONS (1994), which explores how Asian American men’s lives are shaped by racism. From 1993 to 1995, he collaborated with Japan’s NHK, producing some of the earliest High-Definition documentary programming.
In 1996, he began a twenty-year association with HBO Documentary Films, working with legendary Executive Producer Sheila Nevins. BLACK TAR HEROIN chronicled two years in the lives of young heroin addicts and was one of HBO's highest rated documentaries in 1999. REHAB (2005), a disturbing look at drug recovery programs, won the prestigious Nancy Dickerson Whitehead Award, honoring journalists who have "demonstrated the highest standards of reporting on drug issues." He received his third Oscar® nomination for THE MUSHROOM CLUB (2006), a personal look at the city of Hiroshima. His most ambitious production, WHITE LIGHT/BLACK RAIN (2007), a vivid accounting of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, premiered at Sundance and won a Primetime Emmy. In 2009, he received his fourth Oscar nomination for THE CONSCIENCE OF NHEM EN, which tells the story of a young Khmer Rouge soldier who photographed 6,000 men, women and children before they were executed. His last film for HBO, HEROIN: CAPE COD (2015), an intimate look at the heroin epidemic, was screened for the White House and helped bring the Oxycontin Crisis to national attention.
Whenever possible, the filmmaker mixes his filmography with lighter subjects: Tokyo pop culture in HUNTING TIGERS; the Minnesota State Fair in THE FAIR; Wilco’s lead guitarist in APPROXIMATELY NELS CLINE; and a tribute to his childhood hero Toshiro Mifune MIFUNE; THE LAST SAMURAI, which screened at more than twenty international film festivals, including Venice, London and Telluride, and was released theatrically in the U.S. by Strand Releasing. Segments from his films have been featured on The CBS Evening News, The NBC Nightly News, ABC News Nightline, CNN and Oprah. Currently, he’s the Executive Producer of Yuriko Gamo Romer’s baseball documentary DIAMOND DIPLOMACY.
Steven and wife writer Peggy Orenstein have a daughter and live in the Bay Area.