Jamie K. Sims, composer

About the Film    Marii Hasegawa: Gentle Woman of a Dangerous Kind is a documentary film portraying one woman’s extraordinary life’s work for human rights and global peace.    Hasegawa was born in 1918 near Hiroshima, Japan. Her father, a Buddhist priest assigned to mission work, moved his family to California in 1919. Hasegawa graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. After the U.S. government forcibly relocated nearly 110,000 people of Japanese descent in 1942, she and her family were sent to the Topaz internment camp in Utah. This experience led Hasegawa to join the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and inspired her efforts in human rights. She picketed discriminating landlords, protested Nike nuclear missile sites, and in 1965 she organized buses to Washington, D.C., for Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. During the Vietnam War Hasegawa became president of WILPF and led an international peace delegation into North Vietnam, assessing and reporting civilian damage.    In 1996, Marii Hasegawa was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize by the Niwano Peace Foundation of Tokyo, Japan.    The film is directed by Janet Scagnelli and is a Small Steps Films production. www.smallstepsfilms.com.     Sims soundtrack CD, "Gentle Woman of a Dangerous Kind: Documentary Film Score," was released on April 17th, 2012.