Pilgrimage
credits:
Director: Tad NakamuraUSA 2006 | 22 mins | English
IN PERSON (at select screenings): Tadashi Nakamura, Karen Ishizuka
PILGRIMAGE tells the inspiring story of how a small group of Japanese Americans in the late 1960s transformed an abandoned WWII concentration camp for Japanese Americans into a symbol of retrospection and solidarity for people of all ages, races and nationalities in our post 9/11 world.
Although the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is no longer hidden, this dark chapter of American history was virtually forsaken until 1969 when two young Japanese Americans set out to find a place called Manzanar and ended up creating an annual event that has since attracted thousands of people. Calling it a “pilgrimage,” it was the first public event in the nation to call attention to the reality of the WWII concentration camp experience that had almost been deleted from public understanding.
With a hip music track, never-before-seen archival footage and a story-telling style that features both old and new pilgrims, PILGRIMAGE is the first film to show how the WWII camps were reclaimed by the children of its victims and how the Manzanar Pilgrimage now has fresh meaning for diverse generations of people who realize that when the US government herded thousands of innocent Americans into what the government itself called concentration camps, it was failure of democracy that would affect all Americans. As the U.S. is again in tumultuous times, PILGRIMAGE is a timely and engaging film that brings new and much-needed insight to the lessons of the past for our post 9/11 world.
This short film plays in the program The Cats of Mirikitani
Pilgrimage was funded by CAAM.
