The Collegian

Issue date: 3/28/06 Section: News

Media Credit: Annie Douglass Memories of a Geisha speakers discuss accuracy of the award-winning film's message during Friday's discussion panel and movie showing.

The film won three academy awards, it is based upon a New York Times Best Selling novel, and there was a large turnout for its showing on Friday night in Dryden, but Memoirs of a Geisha is not just any other film. Behind all of the awards and praise the film holds a lot of controversy, according to the three Asian American speakers who came to speak out about the controversy that surrounds the film, the most dominant complaint being the casting of Chinese actors in Japanese roles.

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name, the film highlights the life of a young Japanese girl who was sold by her parents to a home where young girls grow up to live the life of a geisha. The book alone held a lot of controversy and as the speakers informed the audience, the script for the film went through a long process running through the hands of Steven Spielberg before landing with director Rob Marshall, best known for his work on Chicago. The film was chosen to be shown in Dryden because March is Asian Pacific American History month, which the speakers found to be a contradiction.

"We made a decision to schedule counter programming for the Memoirs of a Geisha movie because in the Asian Pacific American community it was actually very controversial due to the hiring of Chinese actors to portray Japanese roles," said Andrea Lum, the coordinator for Asian Pacific American student programs at Saint Mary's. "So we felt that it was important to address this issue by bringing other people on campus to discuss the issue directly."

The speakers seemed to be in agreement that the film did not do justice to its subject and in a sense degraded Asians as a whole. This issue brought up the question, as actress Judi Nihei pointed out, as to whether this film drudges up the idea that it is okay to let Chinese actors play Japanese people because as she said people seem to be going back to the old issue of, "do we all look the same."

The film is set to release on DVD next week, but due to the controversy it has yet to have its theatrical release in China where the release of the film has been banned indefinitely.

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