MANZANAR / PILGRIMAGE | Right to Resist: From 9066 to 2021 Film Series

Directed by Robert Nakamura / Manzanar / 1971 / 16 mins

Directed by Tadashi Nakamura / Pilgrimage / 2003 / 23 mins

Two great films on the incarceration experience by two groundbreaking filmmakers from different generations. Manzanar captures pioneering director Bob Nakamura’s emotions upon visiting the Manzanar incarceration camp where he spent his childhood. Tadashi Nakamura’s Pilgrimage tells the inspiring story of how an abandoned Manzanar was rediscovered by young Japanese Americans and transformed into a symbol of retrospection and solidarity for people and nationalities in our post 9/11 world. Bob Nakamura’s film was the first documentary film on the concentration camps by a Japanese American filmmaker.  He’s often referred to as "the Godfather of Asian American media”.

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Part of Right to Resist: From 9066 to 2021 (Sept 13 - Dec 13) curated by Brian Hu of San Diego Asian Film Festival for The Rebellious Miss Breed. The series chronicles resistance, from Fred Korematsu’s acts of disobedience against the incarceration of Japanese Americans to contemporary outrage against post-9/11 internment and racism targeting Muslim Americans and those of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent. Collectively, these works take the Japanese American incarceration and the recent racially-tinged paranoia not as discrete eras, but as a continuum of hate, heartbreak, and distress that has mired our nation from its founding, but that has also inspired its victims to consider more purposefully and imaginatively the paths of resistance that are just as foundational to the nation’s ideals of liberty.

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This conversation is part of the program series The Rebellious Miss Breed: San Diego Public Library and the Japanese American Incarceration.
This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a partner of the NEH. Visit calhum.org.