BU alumna to debut film at Tribeca Film Festival

Boston University College of Communication graduate Chiemi Karasawa will watch the screening of her directorial debut during the Tribeca Film Festival in April.

Her documentary film Elaine Strich: Shoot Me is about a Broadway legend who has remained in the spotlight for more than 60 years.

“It is nice to have Elaine Strich: Shoot Me at the Tribeca Film Festival because it is my directorial debut,” Karasawa said. “It is a premiere in my own town, and making a film about a woman who has made her career in New York City is really exciting.”

After graduating from BU, Karasawa went to New York and has since worked on numerous films and documentaries, including The Sopranos and Where the Wild Things Are, she said. Her office is located in the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, so her career is closely involved with the festival.

“When I got out of BU, I went to work immediately as an assistant to a producer named Richard Brick,” she said. “From there, I trained as a script supervisor.”

A script supervisor assists the director closely in following the script, the story and the filming of a movie, she said.

Through working as a script supervisor, Karasawa said she developed many great relationships with other filmmakers and producers.

“All of them come to play in my work as a producer,” she said. “I had wonderful relationships with people that helped me a lot in my documentaries because they also wanted to make documentary films.”

Karasawa worked with prominent filmmakers such as Spike Jonze and Ellen Kuras. With Kuras, Karasawa worked on the movie The Betrayal and won the Creative Arts Primetime Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking in 2010.

“Every aspect of my career since I graduated BU has paid off because every position I had has itself led to another position,” she said.

Although she began with narrative filmmaking, Karasawa said she is fascinated with documentary films.

“I love documentaries because, at the end of the day, real stories about people are the most fascinating stories,” she said. “There are so many possibilities that do not fit structure into narrative films, so I will always have a passion for documentary and nonfiction stories.”

Charles Merzbacher, a BU film and television professor, said he believes having alumni premiere movies in the Tribeca Film Festival is a great honor for BU.

“It shows the strength across the whole spectrum of production because all the alumni have worked in fiction and nonfiction,” Merzbacher said. “That is interesting about our approach to teaching production in Boston — that we do not really segregate production into documentary and fiction.”

Karasawa said she financed her documentary by receiving funds from investors.

“I was very fortunate to have initial investors who came with a generous fund,” Karasawa said. “After finishing the production, I had other investors come in. I have had people interested in making a deal, but the problem was that they always wanted too much control in the end.”

For future projects, Karasawa and her team recently established a campaign on Indiegogo, a crowd-funding platform that serves to raise money for films, she said.

Karasawa said her time at BU gave her the tools necessary to achieve success.

“It’s a testament to the fact that the experiences that I had at BU are built in me,” Karasawa said. “They gave me a foundation on which to implement my passion for film and the idea that I can do it.”