Kaysville-based filmmaker Kenji Tsukamoto is honored his award-winning documentary “Ashima” will screen Thursday at the Park City Library’s Jim Santy Auditorium.
“The Library Theatre is a venue I’m pretty familiar with,” he said. “I have been going to Sundance since 2004, and it will be surreal to have my film play in one of the venues I grew up watching movies in.”
“Ashima,” about climbing phenom Ashima Shiraishi, who is professionally known by her first name, will start at 7 p.m. and is part of Park City Film’s Made in Utah and Raising Voices series, initiatives that respectively spotlight films with Beehive State connections and showcase underrepresented communities through film screenings, discussions and community dialogues.
“My friends have heard about me making this film since 2012, and it’s been a few years since it premiered in 2023 at DOC NYC in New York,” Tsukamoto said. “We’ve played in 45-plus festivals in 15 countries and won more than 12 awards, but my friends still haven’t seen it. So, I can’t wait for them to be there next week.”
Tsukamoto discovered the young climber through photographer and filmmaker, Tim Kemple.
“Tim, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk are all fantastic creatives, and they had a company back in the day (Camp4 Collective) that I used to work for in Salt Lake,” he said. “I had just finished up at Brigham Young University, and I had a short film I made called ‘Beehive Stories’ while I was there for the local PBS affiliate at the time. It was part of a series that chose one person to represent each county of Utah to tell a collective story about what makes a Utahn a Utahn.”
Tsukamoto’s segment anchored on Topaz, the World War II Japanese American internment camp in Millard County.
“I was fortunate to talk about a man named George Murakami and his experience going from Berkeley, California, to here and then choosing to stay here when he was released from the camp,” he said. “That piece won a regional Emmy, and after that, Tim told me if I was interested in telling more Japanese American stories, there’s a young climber, a phenom, named Ashima, who is the future of the sport.”
After doing some immersive research, Tsukamoto cold-called the family and made a quick connection.
“Ashima’s mother, Miko, is from Fukushima, which is where I was born and where my mom’s from,” he said.
The family invited Tsukamoto to their home in New York in 2012 during Ashima’s Thanksgiving break.
The idea to focus on a young girl who is making waves in the large climbing community appealed to Tsukamoto.
“When I was serving a mission in Japan in 2007, it was a time where the country was dealing with high suicide rates amongst teens, and many of these teens were ‘shut-ins,’ or hikikomori,” he said.
Hikikomori is a Japanese word that refers to someone who withdrawals from society by staying in their rooms without in-person interaction with anyone for months and even years.
“So, before I met Ashima, I had once thought about doing a documentary about that, but I realized if I did that (the project) would feel like a voyeuristic film that really wouldn’t do anything,” he said. “When I learned about Ashima, I felt like young kids, especially girls, needed positive role models in their lives, and I realized she was a great fit.”
Tsukamoto originally pitched the idea to do a 10- to 15-minute short film to the family, but after spending a week with them in New York, he changed his mind.
“I asked if I could move in with no end date, and they were open to the idea of me living with them for multiple years,” he said.
At that time, Ashima was 11 and had been climbing since she was 6.
“She stumbled upon the sport at Rat Rock in Central Park,” Tsukamoto said. “Her dad would take her to the park, and she saw kids climbing boulders and gave it a go.”
Ashima’s father, Poppo, is one of her coaches, according to Tsukamoto.
“He calls himself her ‘babysitter,’ and she has had some great coaches during her career,” he said.
One was Obe Carrion, who also started as a young climber.
“He took her under his wing when she was younger, but when I was filming, it was mostly Ashima and Poppo,” Tsukamoto said.
While coaching Ashima, Poppo used a lot of his background in Butoh, a post-World War II avant-garde form of dance that served as a way for people to physically manifest trauma and healing.
“Poppo came to New York to spread that artform,” he said.
Poppo and Miko, who emigrated to the United States in 1978, had Ashima, their only child, while they were in their 50s, Tsukamoto said.
“I don’t think her parents knew how to be around kids, and the way they raised her was as if she was a member of their dance troupe,” he said. “They were firm and strict and spoke to her like an adult.”
So, when Tsukamoto met Ashima, it was as if he was speaking with someone older and wiser.
“She always had a book in her hand, and she was always reading,” he said. “But I was lucky that Ashima was pretty open with me. Her child-ness came out when I would tell her not to look at the camera, and she would make faces and stick her tongue out. We didn’t keep too much in the film, but I have all of this footage where she’s really goofy, and it just makes me laugh.”
Tsukamoto didn’t film much that first year.
“I set up some Go-Pros so they would get used to the idea of me being there, and I invested in a cinema camera later on when I officially started shooting,” he said. “I just wanted life to play out. I didn’t want to manipulate anything.”
Even when Tsukamoto finished principal photography in 2014, he didn’t really know the film’s storyline.
“I hadn’t looked at the footage while I was shooting, which I should have done,” he said with a laugh. “We also didn’t shoot any interviews throughout the years.”
However, Tsukamoto remembered sitting down with the family and telling them how their dynamics struck him.
“I saw what Ashima was going through was unique, but also universal in that people would relate to what it feels like to be caught between worlds,” he said.
Most of the footage was taken when Ashima was 13, according to Tsukamoto..
“So you have this 13-year-old girl going to the climbing gym, but she climbs at the level of 30-year-old men,” he said. “And when she travels and competes, she is constantly surrounded by adults. And when she’s home she is mostly with her parents who are in their 50s.”
With her career and adult influences, Ashima had trouble balancing being around kids her age, Tsukamoto said.
“She also grew up in a humble immigrant-family situation but also attended an upper-East Side school on scholarship,” he said. “So, her peers have a lot of money, but she doesn’t. (Then) she’s also dealing with trying to be a New Yorker whose parents are artists from Japan. So she’s a true third-culture kid.”
During editing, Tsukamoto decided to double-down on those dynamics for the film.
“My friends who helped me with this film dug through hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage — 40 terabytes,” he said. “That took a long time.”
Another problem arose during the process.
“As we were editing, we found we needed some voice-overs, and potential funders would tell us we needed interviews,” Tsukamoto said. “So, we shot interviews during the height of COVID. We went into a climbing gym, because it was closed, and shot interviews with Ashima.”
Tsukamoto made it a point that the interviews would appear only as voice-overs.
“You never see the sit-down interviews because we wanted to focus on what her life was when she was 12, 13 and 14 and not bring her current life experiences into it,” he said.
Filming Ashima’s life opened Tsukamoto’s eyes to his own experiences.
“I grew up moving every couple of years,” he said. “I moved to America when I was 8. We lived in Washington for a little bit. Then we lived in Kentucky for a little and then in Michigan for a while.”
After moving to Utah, Tsukamoto served a mission in Sendai, Japan, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints..
“No matter where I was, I never felt like I felt in — even when I went back to Japan as a missionary,” he said with a laugh. “Growing up I thought I was really Japanese and I would get bullied for being Asian. But then I went to Japan and saw how American, how white-washed, I was. So, I understood what Ashima was going through, and I think I was in her life when she was isolated a lot, and her parents allowed me to be there like a big brother.”
Tsukamoto accompanied the family to various climbing competitions that took place in Spain. France, Colorado, Oregon, California and New York.
“We did go to South Africa, where Ashima tries to be the youngest person to climb a V-14,” he said.
The competition calendar was intense, as was Ashima’s schedule at home.
“She would go to school and then straight to the climbing gym after school,” Tsukamoto said. “She’d climb until it was past most people’s dinner time and then we would go home and eat.”
Ashima would start her homework while Tsukamoto got ready for bed.
“Sometimes her parents could help with the homework if it was art or something like that, but not with her English or history,” he said. “So, they would also go to bed, and I was amazed that Ashima would have the discipline to stay up until midnight or 1 a.m. to do homework on her own.”
Tsukamoto connected with Park City Film Executive Director Katy Wang in Chicago.
“‘Ashima’ was chosen to be on The Popcorn List, which is a list of the best indie films without distribution,” he said.
Lela Meadow-Conner, who cofounded The Popcorn List, is the current director of the Art House Convergence, a group of independent arthouse theaters, and the convergence decided to invite 10 filmmakers to pitch their films at the Independent Film Exhibition Conference, known as IN/DEX, which it holds every year, Tsukamoto said.
“It was like a science-fair setup where all the filmmakers had tables and people from film festivals and exhibitors walked around and talked with everyone,” he said. “Katy came up to my table and said, ‘I’m with the Park City Film Series,’ and I said, ‘I know who you guys are.’ I told her I was from north of Salt Lake, and it was funny that we had to meet in Chicago to work this out.”
Park City Film: Kenji Tsukamoto’s ‘Ashima’
- When: 7 p.m. Thursday
- Where: Park City Library’s Jim Santy Auditorium, 1255 Park Ave.
- Tickets: parkcityfilm.org/film/ashima
- Web: parkcityfilm.org and ashimathemovie.com