Films of Remembrance 2012

Monday, Feb. 20
Union Bank Hospitality Room, Japan Center East Mall, S.F. Japantown
Admission: FREE  (donations welcome)
Seating limited

More info on Day of Remembrance: www.dayofremembrance.org

A one-day film series held in conjunction with the Bay Area Day of Remembrance on Feb. 19, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, which set the wheels in motion to forcibly relocate some 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry into American concentration camps during World War II.

In Konrad Aderer’s “Enemy Alien” (2011, 82 min.)
 a Palestinian activist’s fight for freedom draws a Japanese American
filmmaker into confrontation with detention regimes of past and present. A first-person documentary, “Enemy Alien” is the gripping story of the fight to free Farouk Abdel-Muhti, a gentle but
indomitable Palestinian-born human rights activist detained in a post-9/11 sweep of Muslim immigrants. Told through the eyes of the
filmmaker, the grandson of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, this documentary takes on unprecedented
intimacy and historical resonance.
• Followed by Web discussion with filmmaker

Run by the Department of Justice, the Santa Fe internment camp held 4,555 men seen as the “worst of the worst.” Despite their experience behind barbed wire, their story has largely been unknown — a hole in the history books for the last 60 years.

John deGraff’s film “A Personal Matter: Gordon Hirabayashi vs. The United States” (1992, 30 min.) examines the struggle for civil liberties by the recently-deceased civil rights icon. During World War II, Gordon Hirabayashi, a second-generation Japanese American, refused to be incarcerated in a U.S. concentration camp on the grounds that Executive Order 9066 violated his Constitutional rights. This acclaimed video takes a personal look at basic protections of the Constitution such as due process of law and individual rights.

“Prisoners and Patriots: The Untold Story of Japanese Internment in Santa Fe” (2011, 90 min.) is the first documentary to fill that void. Based on 20 hours of exclusive interviews with former Santa Fe survivors and their families, declassified government documents and private photographs, this film tells a story that, in many cases, fathers never told their own children after the war.

The prisoners were all men — some Japanese nationals, some U.S. citizens. Many were Buddhist ministers, some were businessmen, teachers or journalists from the West Coast, Hawai‘i, and Latin America whom the U.S. government feared would be able to gain large pro-Japanese followings.

Cory Shiozaki’s “The Manzanar Fishing Club” (2012) is about the inmates who slipped away under the cover of night to find freedom and adventure matching wits with the prized trout of the Sierra Nevada’s high-altitude lakes and streams. All of the fishermen’s stories touched, in one way or another, on a yearning to be free.
• Special 27-minute preview of  feature-length film

Sponsored by:

Nichi Bei Foundation
Bay Area Day of Remembrance Consortium
National Japanese American Historical Society
in conjunction with the Center for Asian American Media

The Nichi Bei Foundation is a fiscally-sponsored project of Community Initiatives

More info: visit www.nichibei.org, www.dayofremembrance.org or e-mail: kenji@nichibeifoundation.org