Last weekend, I attended the Dallas Video Festival to present fair use to the Dallas Video Association crew. Bart Weiss is the founder and programmer of the festival and he helped me out with the workshop. I’m going to write up something on the workshop for the Center for Social Media website and will post a link once it’s up.

In the meantime, while I saw several films and shorts programs that I thoroughly enjoyed, but the highlight was The Cats of Mirikitani, a first doc feature by Linda Hattendorf. Jimmy Mirikitani was, in 2001, a homeless street artist in downtown Manhattan. Hattendorf started filming him in January 2001 when Mirikitani was hunkered down in a plastic alcove outside of a bodega in the swirling snow. The year that follows would change both Mirikitani and Hattendorf in substantial ways. The resulting film is one of those precious few that captures the enduring power of the human spirit and the capacity one has to truly care for another.

Mirikitani was born in the US but spent the majority of his childhood in Hiroshima, returning to the US before the atomic bombing but in time to face Japanese American concentration camps (I hate how everyone refers to them as internment camps in an bald attempt to minimize US-committed atrocity). His life after his 3 and a half year imprisonment and when Hattendorf meets him is hazy but the fact is that the camps haunt him. He stoops over intense drawings of bleak barracks, flames, death in Hiroshima, family scattered, and the cats a young boy in the camps used to ask him to draw. His life was stolen, in addition to his citizenship.

When the Trade Towers fell and toxic dust blanketed downtown, Hattendorf couldn’t help but offer Mirikitani a place to stay and with it, her friendship and her cat. The bulk of the film is the time they spent together and I don’t want to give away the details. The power of the story is in the small kindnesses, the glances of her camera’s lens, the patience of Hattendorf as roommate, filmmaker and friend, and the beauty and intelligence of Jimmy Mirikitani. Not to sound too superlative, but if you ever wonder whether filmmaking has the power to make change in the world, this is one fabulous example.

The film had an ITVS bumper so keep an eye out on the festival circuit - it’s world premiere was at Tribeca - and perhaps broadcast next year (?).