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 Tokyo and food-on-a-stick at the Minnesota State Fair. He is a four-time Academy Award® nominee and won the Oscar® in 1991. He is the recipient of a Primetime Emmy for "Exceptional Merit in Non-Fiction Filmmaking,” a Peabody Award; Camerimage’s "Outstanding Achievement Award;” the Grand Prize at the Banff World Media Festival; the Grand Prix at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, and the City of Hiroshima’s "Honorary Citizen Award.”
Steven was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and grew up in Venice, California, He graduated from San Francisco State University’s film school in 1976 and began his professional career producing and directing children’s films for Churchill Films in Los Angeles until the educational film market collapsed in 1978. After that he floundered for a few years, painting, playing in garage bands (including the infamous punk trio The Maids) and picking up crew work on industrials and commercials, 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.
In 1987, working with John McCormick and Lynn O’Donnell, two friends from film school, and a grant from the American Film Institute, he stepped away from documentaries to make 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 1991, he won the Oscar® for DAYS OF WAITING, the story of a Caucasian artist in a mixed marriage incarcerated with the Japanese Americans during World War II. In 1992, he made TROUBLED PARADISE, which looked look at native culture and activism on the Big Island of Hawai'i, followed by AMERICAN SONS (1993), which explores how Asian American men’s lives are shaped by racism. In 1995, he collaborated with Japan’s NHK, producing some of the earliest High-Definition documentary programming and winning two UNESCO awards.
In 1996, he began a twenty-year association with HBO Documentary Films, working its 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 and Heroin Crisis to national attention.
Whenever possible, the filmmaker sought to balance his weightier projects with lighter ones, as his films on: Tokyo pop culture in HUNTING TIGERS; the Minnesota State Fair in THE FAIR; Wilco’s experimental guitarist in APPROXIMATELY NELS CLINE; and his film about his childhood hero, 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 is proud to be the Executive Producer of Yuriko Gamo Romer’s baseball documentary DIAMOND DIPLOMACY and Daisy Okazaki’s THE SOUL OF MANY PLACES.
Steven and his wife live in the Bay Area.