Moving Walls: American Nightmare to American Dream (film)

Documentary film about the enduring impact of the Heart Mountain , Wyoming, concentration camp—in particular, its surviving barracks—on both the local Wyoming population and on Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated there.

Filmmaker Sharon Yamato begins with the story of returning war veterans who were given the opportunity to enter a lottery in which the prize was farmland for homesteading and the opportunity to purchase leftover barracks from the Heart Mountain camp for a dollar each. The homesteaders and their descendants tell of how the barracks were repurposed to be houses, barns, storage sheds, and many other kinds of structures that greatly aided the homesteaders in setting up their homes and farms. This story is juxtaposed with that of Japanese American incarceration at Heart Mountain and recent efforts to keep that story alive that are centered around recreated barracks at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center in Cody, Wyoming. Yamato mixes interviews with former inmates, historians, and homesteaders and their families with historical and contemporary images of the site and recreated newsreels.

Yamato first visited the Heart Mountain site in 1994 as part of a volunteer crew that brought back two Heart Mountain barracks to Los Angeles for the collection of the Japanese American National Museum. She subsequently wrote a book about the project titled Moving Walls: Preserving the Barracks of America's Concentration Camps . In 2014, she received a grant (through fiscal sponsor Visual Communications ) from the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program for $89,150 to update the book and to produce a video based on it. The film and updated book were both completed in 2017, along with an exhibition titled "Moving Walls: Heart Mountain Barracks in the Bighorn Basin" that opened at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center in September 2017.

Might also like Legacy of the Barracks (1994); The Legacy of Heart Mountain (2014); Something Strong Within (1994)