Steven Okazaki

Since its 1988 premiere, this critically acclaimed documentary series has presented hundreds of films that put a human face on contemporary social issues by relating a compelling story in an intimate fashion. "POV" has won virtually every major film and broadcasting award available, including 38 Emmys, 22 Peabody Awards and three Oscars.

An account of the life and work of legendary Japanese actor Toshirō Mifune (1920-97), the most prominent actor of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema.

When her visa expires, a young Japanese immigrant in San Francisco agrees to marry a Japanese-American boy to avoid being deported back to Japan.

Right outside of Moscow – home to the highest number of billionaires pr. capita – you’ll find the largest junkyard in the world: The Svalka. It’s a hard place run by the Russian mafia. And it's where Yula lives with her mother, her friends and many other people. Life is tough in the Svalka, but it’s also a place where beauty and humanity can arise from the most unlikely conditions. It is from this place that Yula dreams of escaping and changing her life, even if it seems impossible. Oscar-nominated director Hanna Polak followed Yula for 14 years, bringing us along on Yula's journey to achieve this dream.

AMERICAN SONS is a provocative examination of how racism shapes the lives of Asian American men. A simple but compelling performance piece featuring four of the country's best Asian American actors, AMERICAN SONS is a challenging exploration of how prejudice, bigotry and violence twists and demeans individual lives.

The film follows a simple structure, and shows the drug-related degradation of five youths (Jake, Tracey, Jessica, Alice, Oreo) during the course of three years. The film depicts drug-related crimes and diseases: prostitution, male prostitution, AIDS, and lethal overdoses.

Steven Okazaki presents a deeply moving look at the painful legacy of the first -- and hopefully last -- uses of nuclear weapons in war. Featuring interviews with fourteen atomic bomb survivors - many who have never spoken publicly before - and four Americans intimately involved in the bombings, White Light/Black Rain provides a detailed exploration of the bombings and their aftermath.

1985 documentary film about Min Yasui, an attorney from Oregon, Gordon Hirabayashi, a Quaker college student in Washington, and Fred Korematsu, a San Francisco welder and how their lives were affected by Japanese American internment during World War II.

October, 1987. American filmmaker Steven Okazaki is making a documentary about laureated japanese author Kenzaburo Oe, but all goes wrong when he finds out that due to "mistranslated facts" the subject of his film has only one day to spare before leaving the country. During their brief interview, Mr. Kenzaburo affirms that the new generation of japanese artists are "spoiled, un-original and too influenced by Western culture." so, having a japanese film crew rented for four more days, Steven decides to roam the streets of Tokyo filming the lives of the japanese emergent underdog artists, trying to make some sense of Mr. Oe's statement.

The story of Estelle Ishigo, one of the few Caucasians interned with Japanese Americans during World War II. The wife of a Japanese American, Ishigo refused to be separated from her husband and was interned along with him. Based on the personal papers of Estelle Ishigo and her novel Lone Heart Mountain.

An unvarnished look at the heroin epidemic sweeping America's small towns and communities, focusing on on eight young addicts in idyllic Cape Cod, Mass.

The worlds of a former neo-Nazi and the gay victim of his senseless hate crime attack collide by chance 25 years after the incident that dramatically shaped both of their lives. They proceed to embark on a journey of forgiveness that challenges both to grapple with their beliefs and fears, eventually leading to an improbable collaboration...and friendship.

Young adults talk about their HIV-positive condition.

Camp Recovery, located in the coastal town of Santa Cruz, Cal., features a mix of new and long-term addicts, most of whom stay for 30 days (the maximum allowed by most insurance companies). Rehab chronicles their experiences in the center and follows them out into the less-supervised, far more dangerous, "real" world, riding the emotional tidal waves that accompany incremental progress and devastating relapses. The film offers a rare insider's look at the ups and downs of each addict's journey to stay clean.

In 1975, a seven-months pregnant Vietnamese refugee, Giap, escapes Saigon in a boat and, within weeks, finds herself working on an assembly line in Seymour, Indiana. 35 years later, her aspiring filmmaker son, Tony, decides to document her final day of work at the last ironing board factory in America.

An intimate look at Cambodia 30 years after the end of the Khmer Rouge's reign.

A filmmaker's journey to Hiroshima, sixty years after the bomb.