To area cinema fanatics, Okazaki is one of the quiet heroes. He is the deciding voice behind the films shown through Screen/Society and other film programs on campus. These movies, whose screenings are free and open to the public, are not found on video store shelves.

“There’s an educational mission to Screen/Society,” Okazaki said. “We raise the cultural literacy – we do a lot of international films about other cultures and parts of the world – and we show some challenging films that push the envelope.”

Jane M. Gaines is the founding director of the film/video/digital program and was one of two faculty members and a handful of graduate students who attended the first meeting of Screen/Society in 1990. Gaines calls herself president of Okazaki’s fan club.

“And it’s a very big club,” Gaines said. “He’s brilliant.”

If you were to make a movie of Okazaki’s life, you might open with scenes of him tagging along with his parents, both foreign film aficionados, to the library to see 16mm films in California. Then you might cut to his undergrad years at AmherstCollege, where he majored in French and cultural studies. The next segment might show him, in soft focus, as a graduate student in a literature program at Duke in the 1990s.

You’d then try to capture the key moment when Okazaki realized that what he did in his spare time – watch films – was where he should build his career.

Within months of taking over as exhibition programmer, Okazaki collaborated with two professors who teach courses about the Middle East to do a combined series on films from Syria and Iran. During the planning stage, President Bush gave his “axis of evil” speech. The trio decided to show a film from each of the six countries Bush had designated as forming the axis of evil: Syria, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Libya and North Korea.

The result, “Reel Evil: Films from the Axis of Evil,” received worldwide press coverage from CNN, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to the “Times of London” and “Le Monde.”

In Okazaki’s quest to find a film from North Korea, he came across a monster film, similar in special effects to a Godzilla movie, which was an allegory to the rise of communism. The film was produced in the 1980s by current North Korean leader Kim Jong Il who, at the time, was a rabid film buff. The legend behind the film has it that Kim kidnapped a director and an actress from South Korea to work on films for him.

In 2003, Okazaki staged a showing of “11/09/01,” a movie comprised of 11 short films made by 11 filmmakers from 11 countries, with each responding to the Sept. 11 attacks from the localized perspective of people in their own countries. At least 500 people showed up, more than Griffith Theater could hold. Screen/Society held an “emergency” second screening at 11 that night to accommodate the crowd.

In 2004, with the help of some film festival organizers in New York, Okazaki arranged a Turkish film festival, “Arada/Between,” and persuaded a filmmaker and two Turkish film critics to lead discussions of the 10 films.

Another time, he put significant effort into tracking down a Japanese film, “Twilight Samurai,” that his colleagues hadn’t heard of but he wanted very much to show. The morning after he screened it at Duke, it was nominated for an Academy Award. He had to pack it up and ship it to Hollywood immediately so the Oscars judges could view it.

“I thought, that’s validation,” Okazaki said.

David Paletz, the current director of the film/video/digital program, calls Okazaki “an undiscovered treasure.”

“In a low-key way, he is very thoughtful and astute,” Paletz said, adding that Okazaki’s comments often spur others in the program to rethink issues.

Screen/Society is growing, proving that a person doesn’t have to live in New York or Los Angeles to see the best in film.

“Whether I move on to New York or L.A. remains to be seen,” Okazaki said. “For now, I’m enjoying myself at Duke.

“One of the appeals of staying at Duke is being the big fish in a small pond. I have a lot of influence on what we show and can build this thing up.”

Paletz would like the Screen/Society to show films that attract hundreds of viewers; he also wants to create space for films that appeal to only 50 or 30 or 10, he said.

A regular to the Screen/Society screenings told Okazaki that Durham wouldn’t be the same without Screen/Society.

“He said when his friends from New York say they could never live in Durham because there’s no culture, he tells them he’s seen films here that they don’t get to see in New York,” Okazaki said.