Sita, is our Film Doer here at Brown Paper Tickets and she’s put together an amazing film event in Seattle that will take place at the Northwest Film Forum on Capitol Hill this Saturday, April 2, 2011 with all proceeds going to benefit relief efforts in Japan. This event will feature the Seattle premiere of “Fine Totally Fine” directed by Yosuke Fujita.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIVJxdcRuI]

I caught up with Sita and asked her a few questions about the upcoming event:

First of all, what do you do here at Brown Paper Tickets?
I am the Brown Paper Tickets Film Doer and the Film Doer coordinates all film related events. I’m also the cultural attache for film which means that we are the connection with the community, in my case, the film community.

What is Brown Paper Tickets connection with Japan?
Last year we had twelve Japanese students here at Brown Paper Tickets. Paul Rice and I coordinated and supervised these Japanese students for a month. We showed them around, guided them, learned from them and coordinated their internship. We have interns every year from I-Leap, an international nonprofit organization with an intention to cultivate and inspire a new generation of global citizens. The educational program is designed to give the students comprehensive understanding of how Seattle-based organizations and businesses are designing and implementing creative solutions to social challenges.

Tell me a little about what inspired you to organize this event.
So, of course, it all started off, with the disaster in Japan. I just thought we should do something for Japan, reach out and help!

How did you manage to organize this event so quickly and to convince the Japanese filmmakers to donate their film for this special Seattle premier?
I looked for the best suitable partnerships we could have for this and of course, me being the film person, I thought about a film event. So, we thought about one of our longest standing clients, Northwest Film Forum and I called Adam Sekuler, their programmer, and he told me “Absolutely, of course, we were thinking the same thing.” So, with that, we partnered up and within 5 minutes we got it going. We made some calls and sent e-mails. We made a schedule of a few films that we wanted to screen. It was kind of difficult to get anything from Japan because it was right after the disaster and there was no electricity but with our social media we actually talked to one of the producers in Japan, Yuko Shiomkaki. She immediately waived the screening fee of the film “Fine, Totally Fine” and said that we could absolutely screen it.

Is there anything else specifically created for this event?
I wanted to create something special for the event and I knew a designer Garrett Morlan and his friend Japanese designer Daiji and they got us a beautiful design (pictured above), signed. We’ll have this very special design on posters that will be for sale at the event on Saturday. These are a collectors item especially made for Brown Paper Tickets and not available anywhere else.

Got any future fundraising plans?
This is not the last Japanese fundraising event we’ll have. I believe that when you have a disaster a lot of people raise funds in a clump of events and then, all of a sudden, it feels like no body thinks about it anymore. I would like to have a sequence of monthly Japanese films for fundraising so that it will be on-going, at least for the next three months.

All proceeds from this event will go to here.