This provocative documentary should shatter the "model minority" stereotype of Japanese Americans once and for all. Janice Tanaka, who grew up in a multiracial working-class neighborhood of LA, investigates the role of the WWII internment in the lives of her Sansei generation, trying to understand why so many ruined their lives in gangs, drugs and a rash of suicides. This is the disturbing and hushed side of assimilation into the American dream. The newly-released Nisei parents strove to make a life for their children where "camp" need never be discussed. Ironically, this silence drove a wedge between parents and children and ultimately fractured a once-vibrant multicultural community just as the 1960s came to flower.

This beautifully photographed short uses poetry
by Issei Poet Chie Kamegaya and the Kita no
Taiko drum troupe to pay an impressionistic tribute to filmmaker Mieko Ouchi's great aunt, Chiba, who was interned in a tuberculosis sanatorium in British Columbia, during WWII. The film builds to a revivifying climax as the hospital patients unleash their passion for living.