Jade Ajani is a documentary and non-fiction filmmaker based in Portland, OR but originally hails from the rural town of Rochester outside of Olympia, WA. A graduate of Bard College’s school for Film and Electronic Arts, he is a producer of both experimental shorts and remixed appropriations as well as original feature-length documentaries.
Most notably, he is the producer/director of the feature-length documentary Growing Awareness, about the community-supported agriculture (CSA) movement in the Pacific Northwest.
Through a thorough examination of the landscape, his work explores the complex relationships between human economy and ecology. Ajani’s films attempt to investigate the effects of distant institutions and centers of power on the lives of ordinary beings and places, and how this power can effectively be resisted.
Ajani’s new documentary project, Janadhaar, explores indigenous struggles for traditional land rights and the establishment of community-owned ecotourism in the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve in India’s Garhwal Himalaya.
His work has shown at the Olympia Film Festival, the Portland Documentary and eXperimental (PDX) Film Festival, the Tacoma Film Festival, the Washougal International Film Festival, the Reel Work Labor Film Festival, and the Anti-Corporate Film Festival among others. He is one of the founders of Lasercave and a principal organizer of the Helsing Junction Sleepover (http://www.lasercave.biz/sleepover).