A Lot Like You:
The Culture We Inherit and the Legacies We Choose
Seattle-based filmmaker Eliaichi “Ellie” Kimaro is a mixed-race, first-generation American with a Tanzanian father and Korean mother. When Ellie was older and in an interracial relationship of her own, she wanted to better understand this world her father had left behind when he was 18. So when Dr. Kimaro moved back to Tanzania for good, Ellie followed him to make a film about this culture she would one day pass down to her kids.
What Ellie discovered on that trip – in Tanzania, in her family and in herself – is the subject of this personal documentary, A Lot Like You. As both a cultural insider and outsider, Ellie asked questions that most people who grew up on Mt Kilimanjaro would never think to ask. Much to Ellie’s surprise, the stoic women in her family opened up, telling her stories about trauma and survival that they’d never even shared with each other as sisters.
And so Ellie must reconcile this culture she’s inherited with how she defines herself today–as a woman, as an activist and, perhaps most of all, as a mother. And in doing so, she finds a way to translate her father’s Chagga culture into her own personal legacy. A portion of the net proceeds from the film will help fund the construction of a girls’ dormitory at the Vunjo Secondary School in the Kimaro family village of Mwika.
Gender Violence:
Ellie worked professionally as an activist/educator/counselor on issues related to gender violence, trauma and oppression for over 12 years before leaving for Tanzania to make this film. There, sitting with her Aunts in a grass hut on the family’s farm on Mt. Kilimanjaro, she unknowingly tapped into their stories about surviving a lifetime of gender violence and abuse, the likes of which Ellie had never heard before. This talk uses the film as a springboard for opening up new avenues for dialogue, understanding and healing.
Mixed-race and Multicultural Issues:
According to U.S. Census estimates, multiracial Americans have become one of the country’s fastest growing demographic groups. Ellie is a mixed-race activist/filmmaker who is in an interracial relationship of her own. The relationship between her Tanzanian father and Korean mother makes up a significant portion of the film. This talk focuses on the particular experiences of multi-cultural/multi-national families and First Generation Americans (or “Third Culture” Communities—people raised in cultures other than their parents’ native culture) that fall outside the Black/White American paradigm of interracial relationships most commonly depicted on TV.
Cultural Identity:
This film intimately reveals the inter-relatedness of race, class, gender and trauma in shaping our cultural identities. How do our cultures shape our understanding of our world? How do we come to understand the cultures we are born into? How do decide what aspects of our cultures will get passed down to the next generation? And how do our own hidden truths shape our cultural legacies?
The Art of Personal Storytelling:
Originally, this documentary (titled Worlds Apart) was about Ellie’s father and his struggle to fit back in with the Tanzanian family and culture he’d left behind 40 years earlier. However, the final film (titled A Lot Like You) explores how Ellie’s own experiences, as an abuse survivor and a professional trauma counselor, uniquely prepared her to bear witness to her Aunts’ stories. We see how this simple act of sitting together and asking questions releases these women from a lifetime of pain, and inspires Ellie to dig deeper and reveal the hidden truths of her own story. What Ellie discovered on this journey from Worlds Apart to A Lot Like You is the subject of the film, and the focus of this talk.
The Response
“Eli Kimaro has made a luminous and thoughtful film. It is a fascinating and moving exploration of how the stories we tell (and perhaps most importantly, the stories we don’t tell) shape our sense of our histories and identities, and how we choose to pass our stories on to our children and why.
Ms. Kimaro allows us to travel with her as she seeks to create an ―authentic‖ record of her father’s people for her daughter. We see how her journey leads to uncovering a piece of the family story that had never been spoken in her family before, and how this revelation results in her profound and courageous decision to reveal the truth of her own life in new ways.
Hearing these previously untold stories leads Kimaro and her audience to rethink the meaning and complexity of all that has come before; and to understand how her (and our) truth connects her (and us) to the women of her family in a way that transcends generations, cultures and distances. In doing so, this film provocatively reminds us of both the power of story telling and of speaking that which has been unspoken.”
Margaret Hobart, Ph.D., Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence
“This documentary is so powerful and so meaningful. Not only does it get to the core of fundamental issues that we see in this world, it is so sincere and real/raw. Amazing… It has the conversation between generations, across cultures, and ultimately, portrays the individual truths (and not just yours, but your aunts’ as well). It has a conversation about identity, relationships, racism, sexism, violence and more. I simply cannot imagine a better way for this film to have turned out…”
Ankita Patel, Esq.
“A Lot Like You highlights generational abuse, the impact of unspoken trauma on the ongoing cycles of trauma – how it shapes generations – and what it means to be in relationship with family and culture who have engaged in,or been complicit in,that trauma. Eliaichi does a beautiful job of not wrapping things up neatly and showing the complexity of loving people through pain, secrets and differences.
Of course additionally, it’s a beautiful piece about identity, history, contradiction, and migration…”
Vassilisa Johri, MSW
“My first reaction is that it’s very compelling material, a really emblematic postcolonial, post-globalization, and postmodern story that is timely in each of these ways.
I particularly liked the way in which A Lot Like You personalizes the emergent tension between cultural relativist or postcolonial sensibilities on the one hand and the notion of universal human rights on the other. This is one of the defining questions of our time: how do we embrace/embody the values of the various declarations on human rights without re-engaging in modernist or colonial projects? It’s a fraught problem for a time of global cultural diffusion and awareness.”
Aron Hsiao, PhD Candidate, Managing Editor, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
