FROM A SILK COCOON

World Premiere

USA 2005 | 57mins | Video Color

In person: Directors Satsuki Ina and Casey Peek

Most of us are aware that Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, Issei and citizens alike, were imprisoned in concentration camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But what happened to those families for whom the injustice was so unbearable that they renounced their citizenship and repatriated to Japan? Director Satsuki Ina was born in Tule Lake, her brother Kiyoshi in Topaz. FROM A SILK COCOON weaves, through documents, diaries and letters collected by her mother, the tangled skein of a woman's torn allegiance and her efforts, despite pregnancy and illness, to keep hope alive for a husband charged with sedition, and for the children who constantly asked for him. This gripping story of steadfast love and red tape is suspenseful to the end, when the government issues its own ruling on a lovers' pact made on the eve of war.

Preceded by:

HIDDEN INTERNMENT: THE ART SHIBAYAMA STORY

USA 2004 | 27mins | Video Color | English, Spanish & Japanese w/E.S.
DIRECTOR: Casey Peek
Through superb archival footage and witness accounts, this film explores another little-known aspect of the internment: the forced evacuation to the United States of over 2,000 Latin Americans of Japanese descent, mostly Japanese Peruvians. Once released from the camps, they faced a predicament even more bizarre than that of their U.S. counterparts.

—Frako Loden

Sponsored by Applied Materials