Production Team

Crew Bios

Cinematographer Emily Taguchi-Klingensmith’s credits include Silk Grandmothers, Days of our Tortuga, and The Unforgotten War. She has also shot and produced stories for Spark, KQED’s weekly arts magazine, and for ABC Now, CBS Newspath, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, Current TV, KQED Public Television, PBS Frontline & World, GOOD Magazine, and The New York Times. Ms. Taguchi-Klingensmith was born and raised in Japan, then was educated at Tufts University. She lived in San Francisco for 10 years and now resides in Paris, France. She is also a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Cinematographer Monica Lam most recently was producer and principal camera for The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and its adaptation into an opera. Monica Lam has produced several international reports for the PBS series FRONTLINE/World, including Paraguay: Sounds of Hope, A Message from the Sea. Lam has worked to document the lives of young sweatshop workers in southern China for China Blue worked as a line producer on Bolinao 52, a documentary about Vietnamese boat people, and explored the aftermath of apartheid in the tragic, Academy Award nominated story of a young South African photographer. Lam is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Consulting Editor Nathaniel Dorsky is an experimental filmmaker, documentary film editor, and preeminent documentary story doctor and editing consultant. Dorsky has been the recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the LEF Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the California Arts Council.

Consulting Producer Marc Smolowitz is an Academy Award® nominated film, TV & new media producer (The Weather Underground, Trembling Before G-d), director (The Power of Two) and executive producer (Still Around/The HIV Story Project/Generations HIV) with 20+ years of experience across all aspects of the entertainment and media business. Most recently, he was the producer at TellyTopia, a Silicon Valley start up specializing in interactive television, IP-TV and VOD products for cable companies. In 2012, he works full time as an independent filmmaker, while maintaining a thriving consulting practice that guides other documentary producers through key stages of development, production, post, completion, and distribution. As a freelancer, he regularly works on special projects with a diverse slate of SF Bay Area-based media and technology companies, nonprofits, and philanthropies. Finally, he is also a lecturer in the Film & Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since 2007, Smolowitz has served as Chair of the founding board of directors of the San Francisco Public Press - a nonprofit news start up committed to local, investigative print and online journalism that serves the public interest needs of under served communities in San Francisco.

Composer Mark Izu’s compositions are characterized by his seamless integration of jazz with other music traditions and his mastery of cross-cultural instrumentation. Particularly relevant to this project is his career long study of gagaku, the oldest classical music form in Japan. Izu has composed scores for film, live music concerts and theater. His film scores include Steven Okazaki’s Academy Award-winning Days of Waiting; Wayne Wang’s Dim Sum Take Out; KTEH’s Emmy-winning documentary, Return to the Valley and James Kulp’s PBS documentary, Westward to China.

Associate Producer Erika Brekke is a freelance videographer and editor based in San Francisco, CA. She is particularly interested in producing documentaries on environmental and social issues. Her work has appeared in Outside Magazine, Slate Magazine, OnEarth Magazine and elsewhere. Before beginning her freelance career, Erika worked as a news intern for the Associated Press Television News in Brussels, Belgium covering politics at the EU headquarters, as well as a war crimes trial in The Hague. She holds a Master’s Degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Assistant Editor Yuko Inatsuki-Oberjat is a bilingual Japanese/English editor and cinematographer. She has worked on documentaries, We Are All Radioactive and The Power of Two, which was showcased at DocFest, Tokyo International Film Festival, and won the audience award at the San Diego Asian Film Festival in 2011. Originally from Nagoya, she's an experienced diver who aspires to be Japan's greatest female ocean explorer.