Yuri Kochiyama is a dedicated 88 year-old grassroots organizer, activist and an archivist of the Civil Rights Era. Nominated for a 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, she is best known for her political involvement with Malcolm X, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, Asian American movements and campaigns to release U.S. political prisoners. After her experience in World War II’s Japanese-American “internment camps,” Kochiyama was primed for activism. In 1960, when she and her husband moved with their large family into public housing in New York’s Harlem, she worked with neighborhood educational struggles and rapidly became a respected community activist and organizer. She met Malcolm X in a courthouse after she’d been arrested in a labor protest. She joined his organization of Afro-American Unity and supported a Pan Asian perspective by collaborating with the Hibakusha (Japanese Atom Bomb survivors) and having a strong Anti-Vietnam War stance. Despite her frail health, Kochiyama remains undaunted in her efforts to free U.S. political prisoners; her personal correspondence has sustained hundreds of men and women—many of whom she has helped gain freedom. Kochiyama devotes her life to progressive causes and is an inspiration to young people and activists around the globe.

The subject of several documentaries and books, Kochiyama moved to Oakland in 1999. She and Davis live several miles apart and cross paths regularly at conferences and political events. Her book, Passing It On-A Memoir, was published in 2004. The reviews includes one by Angela Davis: “In this book, [Kochiyama] passes on a legacy of humility and resolve, vitality and resistance, and, perhaps most important of all, hope for the future.”

The conversations between these two formidable women are full of vitality, humility, resolve and hope. Their conversations (begun in 1996) about ethical and social implications of the vast prison industrial complex on education, civil liberties and the arts proved to be chillingly perceptive when they picked up their conversation thirteen years later, in 2009. Davis’ and Kochiyama’s passion, vast historical knowledge, cogent observations and analysis are stunning and offer important lessons in empowerment and community building for current and future generations.

Yuri Kochiyama and Angela Y. Davis embody personal and political experiences, theories, struggles and art; and together, they constitute a commitment and diversity of lives of women doing liberatory cultural work. They are writers, friends, spiritual leaders, aunts, mothers, lovers, educators, warriors, icons, and role models who inspire and challenge the larger and often hostile society, their own generations, and many generations to come. And together, they constitute a culture of protest.

Born out of Co-Director C. A. Griffith’s experiences while filming Eyes on the Prize, she noticed that some of the most natural, relaxed and interesting exchanges often happened when shooting stopped to change sound reels or film magazines. After viewing a segment in Pratibah Parmer’s A Place of Rage, where Angela Davis and June Jordan meet in the same frame after extended, separate interviews—there was the expectation of a conversation between these two amazing women that never happened. Griffith and her Co-Director, H. L. T. Quan wondered what a joy it would have been to hear what they had to say to one another. Mountains That Take Wing offers audiences the gift of these remarkable women’s conversations about life, individual and community strategies to resist oppression, and their steadfast resolve that not only is another world possible, but it is vital.

Over a decade in the making, this documentary was filmed in HD, MiniDV and Hi8 video. Originally planned as a series of conversations between Davis and three generations of women doing cultural work—June Jordan, Elizabeth Martinez, Julie Dash, Jude Narita, Abbey Lincoln, The Poetess and others—the project was simply too unwieldy and was refocused on political culture, Davis and Kochiyama.

C. A. (Crystal) Griffith is an independent filmmaker and Associate Professor of Film and Media Production at Arizona State University. Griffith was raised in Washington, D.C., sojourned in Barcelona, Spain and is a graduate of Stanford University (BA) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (MFA). Griffith's credits include Juice (1992), award-winning PBS and BBC documentaries such as A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (cinematographer), Branford Marsalis: The Music Tells You (camera operator) and Depeche Mode 101 (both directed by D.A. Pennebaker), Eyes on the Prize I & II, St. Clair Bourne’s Making ‘Do the Right Thing’ and music videos from Tracy Chapman and Public Enemy to The Rolling Stones.

A finalist for the 2010 Sundance Screenwriters Labs, Griffith’s feature-length screenplay, Blues for the Sea is adapted from her short screenplay, winner of the 2007 Martha Muñoz Award of the Latino Screenplay Competition. Also awarded a 2004 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Media Arts, and a 2000 Panavision/Kodak University Outreach Program Grant, Griffith's short film, Border.Line…Family Pictures won the Vision in Color Award of the New England Film/Video Festival. In 1999, she received a grant from Digital Media's Avid Feature Film Camp for her film, Del Otro Lado (The Other Side). Shot on location in Mexico City and screened extensively at U.S. and international film festivals, Griffith directed, co-edited and co-produced this Spanish language, independent feature.

Griffith's publications appear in Reinventing North America (forthcoming), Filming Difference, Black Feminist Cultural Criticism, Black Women Film and Video Artists, The Wild Good, the journals Meridians, SIGNS and CALYX. Recruited to help build Arizona State University’s new film production program in the School of Theatre and Film, she relocated to Phoenix in 2007. Previous academic appointments: Columbia College Chicago (2000-2006), Smith College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (1997-2000).

H. L. T. Quan (Ph.D. University of California-Santa Barbara) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Justice & Social Inquiry at Arizona State University, and an Affiliate Faculty in African/African American Studies, Asian Pacific American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research centers on race, gender and economic and political thought. She is currently writing a book about savage developmentalism and its tendentious propensity to secure order and capitalist expansion. This study investigates foreign policy conducts by Japan in military Brazil, the United States in occupied Iraq, and China in Sudan amidst humanitarian disasters. She is also working on a collaborative project on the historical and political development of Black capitalism in the United States, a 17-city comparison.

Professor Quan has produced, hosted and served as a regular correspondent on radio and community access television public affairs programs for over fifteen years. Her work has been published in Social Identities, Race and Class, Meridians, and SIGNS.

Mountains That Take Wing: Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama -  A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation
97 minutes • 2009

Mountains That Take Wing features conversations that span thirteen years between two formidable women whose lives and political work remain at the epicenter of the most important civil rights struggles in the US. Through the intimacy and depth of conversations, we learn about Davis, an internationally renowned scholar-activist and 88-year-old Kochiyama, a revered grassroots community activist and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize nominee's shared experiences as political prisoners and their profound passion for justice. On subjects ranging from the vital but largely erased role of women in social movements of the 20th century, community empowerment, to the prison industrial complex, war and the cultural arts, Davis' and Kochiyama's comments offer critical lessons for understanding our nation's most important social movements and tremendous hope for its youth and the future. This documentary was completed summer, 2009 through a prestigious, Art & Technology post-production residency award at Wexner Center for the Arts (2009-2010). Photographed, Recorded, Produced, Directed & Edited by C. A. Griffith & H. L. T. Quan. 

A Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Angela Y. Davis is an internationally acclaimed scholar, professor, author and activist. As a child growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, she witnessed and experienced the brutality of the Jim Crow regime of intolerance, violence and hatred; her parents were teachers and activists. In 1969, she was fired from her Assistant Professor position in UCLA’s Philosophy Department because of her political activism and membership in the Communist Party, but was rehired after public protest. A year later, her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers lead to a warrant for her arrest and placement on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Once captured, international campaigns to “Free Angela Davis” lead to her eventual release and acquittal on all charges. A founder of Critical Resistance, Davis remains a staunch advocate for prison abolition and has developed powerful critiques of the criminal justice system. Her books include If They Come in the Morning, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Women, Race and Class, Women Culture and Politics, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Are Prisons Obsolete? Abolition Democracy, and Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation.