80 Years Later (film)

Documentary film by Celine Parreñas Shimizu that explores in the impact of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans on three generations of family members.

The film focuses on Shimizu's father-in-law, Tadashi Robert Shimizu, and his cousin, Kiyu Fujiu, and their descendants. Robert was a toddler when the war began and his father arrested and interned. With his mother and brother, he was incarcerated at Poston , where his father eventually jointed them. The family resettled in Cincinnati in 1944 and started a food production company, while Robert became a star athlete in high school. Kiyo was sixteen and living in Redwood City, California, when the war broke out and was sent with her family to Tanforan . She and her family resettled in Chicago. In Cincinnati, the film depicts conversations between Robert, his grandson Matthew Risk, and his daughter (and Matthew's mother) Jenny Shimizu Risk, along with visits by the group to his childhood home and to the site of the family business. In Chicago, Kiyo talks about her life with daughter Jean M. Fujiu and other family members. The discussions with the younger relatives—many of whom are of mixed race ancestry—center on the legacy of the incarceration and its long-term impact and the need to carry on that legacy.

Filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu, a film scholar and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, cites a 2013 family reunion as the birthing of the film project. Structured around Robert's induction into his high school hall of fame for his football exploits, it led to his telling the family about his family's incarceration and early life in Cincinnati. Shimizu told ABC7 BayArea interviewer Kristen Sze that the legacy of the incarceration "continues to be grappled with today" and that she wanted to explore how the descendants claimed the inheritance of the incarceration. ^[1]

80 Years Later premiered at the Los Angeles Asian American Film Festival.

Might also like Good Luck Soup (2016); Changing Season: On the Masumoto Family Farm (2015); Relocation, Arkansas: Aftermath of Incarceration (2016)