Film Guru Finds Passion in Working with Students
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By Zach Thomae, membership intern
He selects and presents films for the Wisconsin Film Festival. He advises the Wisconsin Union Directorate (WUD) Film committee and oversees film programming at the Marquee. He helped choose films for Cinematheque, the group of student groups and academic departments “showcasing films that would otherwise never reach Madison screens.” He does rooftop screenings for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. By any measure, Tom Yoshikami is one of Madison’s premier film gurus.
“The movie that made me really discover film was Chungking Express. It had a visual style unlike anything I’d seen before–the handheld camera work, the time lapse, the use of color, all fantastic. It had a fragmented narrative structure, with two successive stories that are somehow related to building a larger romantic story. It uses notably different styles in different parts of the film. That was my first favorite film.”
Tom discovered film in Chungking Express as an undergraduate at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. However, he didn’t just discover film as an art form. Working in the Tower Theatre, an arthouse movie theater in Salt Lake City, he also developed an interest in film exhibition, in the art of film presentation. He combined these two interests in forming a film society at the University, screening rarely-seen foreign films on campus.
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Tom came to Madison in 2001 as a graduate student, to study film in the communication arts department. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in film studies with a focus on the history of art films.
He started programming for Cinematheque through the communication arts department in 2004. The films he worked with are rare enough that he actually had to work with archivists to get a hold of some of them. In one case, he had to work with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to get a series of films by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, an art film pioneer.
He also worked with the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on their film programming. He started doing the rooftop programming, focusing mostly on avant-garde films, as well as the spotlight series, mostly containing international documentaries and independent films.
During this time, he also began to program for the Wisconsin Film Festival. This Wisconsin Film Festival is an annual event, presented by the UW-Madison Arts Institute and the communication arts department, where a set list of films and film-related activities are screened in nine theaters on campus and throughout the Madison community. Tom has worked as a programmer for the festival for a few years, usually programming films based on a “hodgepodge of things that interested” him. He also hosted some of the showings and ran Q&A sessions with directors. This year, he’s programming international documentary films.
In all of these places, his work involves showing films that people won’t get a chance to see elsewhere. However, Tom says that isn’t his main goal. Rather, he is more interested in showing “films that are going to be memorable, films that will stick with [the audience], films that will get them talking.”
He continues: “My favorite sight is being able to see people leave a theater excited, watching them talk to one another, knowing that this experience will last long after they leave the theater, in the car, on the way home, at dinner talking about it.”
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For the past two years, he’s also advised the WUD Film Committee. The committee programs for the Marquee on most nights, and also hosts film festivals, including its very own mini_indie film festival this May. Its members are also helping as film captains at the Marquee for the Wisconsin Film Festival, helping to run the showings.
As committee advisor, Tom says that his responsibilities are relatively lightweight and mostly advisory. “They do all of the programming. If they have questions, they come see me, and they talk to me about general concerns. But for the most part, they’re doing it.” He does work with them to program the space, as well as hiring trained projectionists for the showings.
Tom is visibly proud to advise the committee.”It’s a joy to work with such a talented group on the committee. They are amazingly bright and passionate about what they do, and to work with them, to really use and how off the Marquee has been a lot of fun.” The Film committee currently has about 50 members, 7 of which are on the leadership team.
Having advised the Art committee as well, it should be no surprise that Tom has become quite fond of working with students, providing them with opportunities and experiences that they otherwise might not have enjoyed. He even helps students in his academics, as a TA. As I left my interview, he made sure to tell me how to focus my profile: “Anything that you can add about the students and their film festival would be great.”
