February 5, 2007

Film screening, book talk to mark World War II internment anniversary

UCSC will mark the 65th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the legal order that led to the wartime incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, with the Santa Cruz premiere of Pilgrimage, a new documentary by award-winning filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura.  (See earlier Currents story)

Coproducer Karen Ishizuka will also be on hand to talk about her new book, Lost & Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Internment.

The event takes place Friday, Feb. 9, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in Oakes Lecture Hall 105.  Admission is free.

With a hip-hop music track and never-before-seen archival footage, Pilgrimage tells the inspiring story of how a small group of Japanese Americans in the late 1960s transformed the abandoned Manzanar, California, concentration camp into a symbol of retrospection and solidarity for people of all ages, races and nationalities. The documentary is slated for broadcast on PBS, and will tour the West Coast this spring. Tadashi Nakamura is the award-winning director of Yellow Brotherhood and a student in the master's program in social documentation of the Community Studies Department.

In her new book Lost & Found, Karen Ishizuka combines heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship to reveal the complexities of the Japanese American struggle to reclaim their own history. 

Sponsored by the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, Community Studies Department, and Asian Pacific Islander Student Alliance. For more information and/or disability related needs, call (831) 459-5349 or e-mail aapirc@ucsc.edu.