Little Murders (USA, 1998, 20 min)
A darkly comic musical about the mystery of death, communication of spirits, and the redemption that comes from knowing the truth. A violent father returns to earth as a ghost and wanders the streets searching for clues to the cause of his death through his daughter, an L.A.P.D. homicide detective.

Off Limits (USA, 1988, 8 min)
Tajiri interweaves the endings of two films, Off Limits, a 1988 cop movie set in Vietnam, and Easy Rider, an iconic 1969 film revealing the hopelessness of the “American dream”. Through the layering of text and audio-visual imagery from these films, Tajiri rewrites the narrative of a Vietnamese character who was featured in the background of Off Limits. The culminating effect simultaneously examines the portrayal of Vietnam within American cinema and centers the often overlooked history and perspective of the Asian-American experience.
History and Memory:

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (USA, 1991, 32 min)
Groundbreaking and haunting, this film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. History and Memory looks at the experience of the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in U.S. Concentration Camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Tajiri wanted to address the phenomena of repressed memory shrouded in silence and forgetting that occurs amongst victims of trauma.

Body of Work with Rea Tajiri: Little Murders, Off Limits, and History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige