At college Whiton studied Japanese and Japanese culture. He spent part of his junior year in Iwate, a largely rural province in northeastern Japan, returning to work there after graduation. “I don’t know of another place like Japan. Everything around you seems to reflect a conscious effort at design.” He loved to walk the countryside, “photographing and making observations.” By day he would teach Japanese children in local schools, working alongside their parents. By night he taught their grandparents. 

Whiton spent over four years in Japan. During that period he began making short “experimental films” of what he saw around him. REFLECTIONS FROM ANOTHER was a meditation on relationships told through moving drawings. Another short film, set in a Japanese garden, showed a cat teaching a woman how to see. 

Whiton returned to the US to take up an Art Department position at The Putney School in Vermont. Vermont reminded him of northeastern Japan. It was like coming home to the same low green mountains, the dairy farms, the relatively poor region dotted with expensive spas and resorts. 

All Vermont lacked was hot springs and volcanoes.    

Settling in at Putney he began to write screenplays and submit them to film festivals.  “Romancing the Dead”, a romantic comedy about a character in the afterlife who has to let go of his past in order to find true love, received the Best Feature Screenplay/Columbine Award at the Moondance Film Festival in 2005.  “The Bonsai” inspired by Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece IKIRU, won a clutch of honors before taking the Grand Prize at Script P.I.M.P. 2005. It’s the story of a retired Japanese office worker who overcomes his feelings of isolation when he experiences the history of a mystical Bonsai tree and is changed by the lives of everyone who cared for it over the years. The Cinequest Film Festival offered this review in their coverage: “The characters in each small story are rich with the kind of depth and detail that other authors can only establish over an entire manscript.” Whiton is currently talking with Japanese producers about possibly producing “The Bonsai” in Japan. 

I WAS A DANCER, a film that premiered at the Palm Springs Festival of Short Films in September 2005, came about in a very different way. “After years of photographing, I developed a great hunger to see images of life in motion.” Whiton had returned to Iwate to visit old friends. While he was there he attended a traditional street procession with the original purpose of filming their son in the children’s parade. He happened to stay on to film the rest of the festivities. In true Cinema Verite fashion, it was only when he started to edit the images that a story suggested itself. 

In the finished film we see a vibrant and colorful column of dancers and musicians winding its way through city streets. The camera moves from the dancers to the crowd, occasionally lingering on a face. It ultimately settles on an elderly woman huddled at the edge of the street and the film suddenly becomes a haunting testimony for her. “I discovered the story while I was editing the footage: that the elders in my community eventually fade... but the love and energy of the dance still pulsates in their ears.” 

I WAS A DANCER, with a soundtrack composed by Whiton himself, was well received in Palm Springs. “It was amazing for me to share it with such a large audience,” Whiton recalls. “Someone shouted Bravo!” and Roberta Munroe from Sundance found me later to say how beautiful she thought it was.”  

Whiton is already hard at work on a new film project – a planned feature documentary about the people who preserve and celebrate the culture of The Beatles around the world.  The idea came to him in Japan. Where else? He was in a music club in Tokyo listening to a tribute band called The Silver Beats when inspiration hit. Whiton later published a photo of the band in Rolling Stone, then his passion naturally evolved into a film. Whiton loves The Beatles nearly as much as he loves Japan.  “It was one of the best days of my life when I discovered I could combine these two great loves under one roof” he says.   

He reckons that tribute bands have taken on a special meaning in Japanese culture. In America the idea of musical tribute suggests Elvis Presley. “It exists in the wonderful world of kitsch; a close cousin to the drag review. In Japan it’s different. It’s an integral part of artistic tradition. The student strives to follow in the style of the master. To use the classic Zen lesson, he draws bamboo until he becomes bamboo.”

For Whiton, it’s a life’s passion.

For more information visit www.jasonwhiton.com 

Donald Rae is the Deputy Film Director for the Vermont Film Commission and will frequently cover industry events and happenings in that State for IMAGINE..