"From Okinawa With Love" Documentary feat. Photographer Mao Ishikawa

Date: May 3, 2025

Time: 4:30 p.m.

---

Hosted by the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival / VC Film Fest

North American Premiere | Japanese with English subtitles | 101 minutes

Filmmakers in attendance. Film program will be followed by Q&A.

GET TICKETS (FREE/PAY WHAT YOU CAN)

An Okinawan photographer, Mao Ishikawa spent her early 20s working as a barmaid in establishments catered specifically to African American GIs stationed in Okinawa. “There was love,” as the tagline reads; her photography book, “Red Flower – The Women of Okinawa” captured the diaristic intimacy of friendships, love affairs, and wild nights shared amongst her social circle of that time. Looking back on those photographs and Okinawa in the wake of its reversion to Japan in 1972 after the U.S. rule, Mao takes us on the journey of her ardent-photographer life through history, politics, racism, love, empowerment, and ​​raison d’être.

ABOUT MAO ISHIKAWA:
Born in Ogimi Village, Okinawa Prefecture in 1953. In 1971, the November 10th General Strike prompted her to decide to become a photographer. In 1974, she studied photography at the WORKSHOP Photography School "Tomatsu Shomei Classroom". In 1975, while working at a bar for black soldiers, she began photographing black soldiers and the women working there. For half a century, she has been based in Okinawa and continues to create works, spending time with people, mainly those connected to Okinawa, while taking photographs. In 2011, she won the Sagamihara Photography Award for "FENCES, OKINAWA". Since 2014, she has been holding the creative photography series "Great Ryukyu Photography Scroll," which recreates the history of Okinawa. In 2019, she won the Photographic Society of Japan Writer's Award, and in 2024, she will win the Domon Ken Award and the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award.

---

---