Farewell to Manzanar

Inspired by the true-life experience of its star George Takei, Allegiance follows one family's extraordinary journey in this untold American story following the events of Pearl Harbor. Their loyalty was questioned, their freedom taken away, but their spirit could never be broken.

Mist. Dust. A bowling alley in the crosshair of a thunderstorm. A pregnant woman, a businessman and a widower find shelter in its midst. Pins are knocked down until gloomy moths kindle an outage.

Kylie, a college nursing student troubled and traumatized by the recent events of her passing boyfriend, learns to find peace and strength through an ancient practice from the relationships around her.

In 1971, five college buddies from the University of Texas embark on a final road trip odyssey across the Mexican border before facing up to uncertain futures, in Vietnam and otherwise.

An ensemble coming-of-age story centered around a group of teenagers who navigate friendship, romance, and betrayal in their final year of sleep-away camp.

December 7, 1941 - TOMIKAZU “TOMI” NAKAJI (Kyler Ki Sakamoto) and his best friend BILLY DAVIS (Kalama Epstein) are playing baseball in a field near their homes in Hawaii when Japan launches a surprise attack on the US at Pearl Harbor. As Tomi looks up at the sky and recognizes the Blood-Red Sun emblem on the fighter planes, he knows that his life has changed forever. Based on actual events, Under the Blood-Red Sun is an unforgettable story of friendship, courage and survival.

Zip, a 17 year-old Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) baseball pitcher, faces the tragic circumstances of the World War II internment of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry. Set in a relocation camp in the summer of 1943, this film chronicles the journey of an American family torn apart by a forced and unjust incarceration, a father's decision that challenges his son to find strength, and ultimately his son's triumph through courage, sacrifice and the All-American game of baseball.

1945: after the death of his father, Ken escapes Japanese American internment camp to find his Caucasian mother who lives in town. Things become complicated, however, when Kens little brother, Jo, joins him at the last minute.

Leaving internment camps to defend their country in Europe, Japanese-American Nisei soldiers of WWII became the most decorated unit in American history.

Filmmaker/activist Melaw Nakehk’o has spent the pandemic with her family at a remote land camp in the Northwest Territories, “getting wood, listening to the wind, staying warm and dry, and watching the sun move across the sky.” In documenting camp life—activities like making fish leather and scraping moose hide—she anchors the COVID experience in a specific time and place.

The film expresses the history of oppression, discrimination, violence and hate in America. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

At the start of World War II, Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were faced with the threat of forced removal and incarceration in concentration camps. A small number took their fate in their own hands, fleeing to interior states, becoming refugees in their own country, on a forced migration into the unknown. Before They Take Us Away is the first feature documentary to chronicle the untold stories of the “self-evacuees” who spent the war years outside the camps, as they struggled to rebuild their lives and overcome poverty, isolation, hostility and racial violence.

This short documentary produced by the University of Oregon Multimedia Journalism graduate program explores memories of Portland's Japantown – Nihonmachi – and the thriving Japanese American community in Oregon prior to World War II. The film features Chisao Hata, an artist, teacher and activist, and Jean Matsumoto, who was incarcerated at the Portland Assembly Center and in the Minidoka concentration camp as a child.

A Palestinian activist's fight for freedom draws a Japanese American filmmaker into confrontation with detention regimes of past and present.

The long-suppressed story of 12,000 Japanese Americans who dared to resist the U.S. government's program of mass incarceration during World War II. Branded as 'disloyals' and re-imprisoned at Tule Lake Segregation Center, they continued to protest in the face of militarized violence, and thousands renounced their U.S. citizenship. Giving voice to experiences that have been marginalized for over 70 years, this documentary challenges the nationalist, one-sided ideal of wartime 'loyalty.'

Violinist and songwriter Kishi Bashi travels on a musical journey to understand WWII era Japanese Incarceration, assimilation, and what it means to be a minority in America today.

This film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And like so many who were in the camps, Tajiri’s family wrapped their memories of that experience in a shroud of silence and forgetting. This film raises questions about collective history – questions that prompt Tajiri to daringly re-imagine and re-create what has been stolen and what has been lost.

Music provided relief during the years of the Japanese American internment throughout WWII. Mary Nomura performed in Manzanar for the three years of her incarceration, and she became known as the "Songbird of Manzanar." In this film, Mary shares old field recordings of her musical performances in Manzanar, believed to be the only surviving field recordings of music from Japanese American internment. In the conclusion of the film, Mary honors her nickname and sings one of her favorite jazz standards by George Gershwin.

Fumiko Hayashida: The Woman Behind the Symbol is both a historical portrait of Fumiko, her family and the Bainbridge Island Japanese American community in the decades before World War II as well as a contemporary story which follows 97-year old Fumi and her daughter Natalie as they return to the site of the former Minidoka internment camp, their first trip back together in 63 years. The film reveals how the iconic photograph became the impetus for Fumiko to publicly lobby against the injustices of the past.

A documentary film about the internment of Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain, Wyoming during World War II. The program, hosted by Jan Yanehiro, proceeds in part as a series of interviews. It also includes archival film footage of Heart Mountain and Japanese Americans during World War II, as well as present day footage of the Heart Mountain landscape.