Canadian filmmaker
Midi Onodera is a Japanese-Canadian filmmaker. Onodera's works feature a collage of formats, from 16mm to Hi8 video and digital video to 'low end' digital toy formats, and address individual, collective, national and transnational identities.[1]
Early life
Midi Onodera grew up in an all-white mainly Jewish neighbourhood. Her grandmother came to Canada over 80 years ago, and speaks a rare combination of Japanese from the Meiji Period and English.[2] In her last years of college she was enrolled full time in independent study, which allowed her full access to equipment available at the school. She was inspired to start her career as a filmmaker after receiving a negative criticism from her professor in her final critique who stated that she was going against the traditions of painting by writing on the canvas and telling stories.[2]
Career
Onodera was born in Toronto, Ontario. Her work is short and feature-length films and videos, and is exhibited internationally.[1] She created over 25 independent short films as well as a theatrical feature film and numerous short videos. Beginning in 2006, Midi created almost 500 short videos for various projects. She has published two essays on mobile cinema for Jump Cut.[3]
Feminist film scholar Judith Mayne writes that Onodera's film Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax) (1985) "is less concerned with affirmative representations of lesbian experience than with explorations of the simultaneous ambivalence and pressure of lesbianism with regard to the polarities of agency and gender."[4] Mayne notes that this film "almost caused a riot" at the Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco.[5]
Film scholar Catherine Russell has analyzed Onodera's "movie-a-day" project, which consisted of 365 short videos shot primarily on a "VcamNow" toy digital camera. Russell described the videos as being "like a surprise package or candy to unwrap, taste, and dissolve in your mouth--or in your hand as the case may be."[6] She argues that "the project articulates another spatial and temporal world, which is that of digital media--a fragmentary, networked, omnipresent world in which the subject is infinitely disperse."[6]
Performance artists Tanya Mars, called her "a thoughtful, daring filmmaker at a time when there was very little diversity in Canadian art".[7]
Midi Onodera has also been a panellist, jury member, guest speaker, and lecturer for over 50 different film organisations, institutions and Universities around the world. Some of her most notable appearances are, a Guest Speaker for a Canadian Cinema class at Meiji Gaukin University in Tokyo, Japan in 2008, a jury member for the 2002 Toronto Arts Council and a panellist for various discussions for the Winnipeg Film Group in 2015.[8]
She currently works for MAC Cosmetics as a media consultant, director and producer.[9]
