Chisato (Chisa) Hughes is a filmmaker based in the Bay Area working in nonfiction and hybrid, speculative forms. Their most recent film, “Many Moons”, asks questions about ghosts and placemaking today– looking at the history of the expulsions in Humboldt and the Chinese people who (often with the help of local tribes) continued to live in the county despite the threat of white violence.
Chisato has 10+ years of production experience, having worked professionally on commercial sets and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as Media Producer for 8 years. Chisato graduated from UC Santa Cruz’s MFA in Social Documentary, studying Asian American identities, Indigenous-Asian solidarities, anti-carceral feminisms and the power of the ‘speculative’ in documentary.
Chisato believes in documentary as a means and an end-in-itself; a site for empathy, for reckoning social histories and subjective relationships, for bearing witness and ultimately, bringing the viewer back to their body.