Before They Take Us Away (film)

Documentary film on " voluntary evacuation ," built around interviews with Japanese Americans whose families were among the roughly 5,000 who left the West Coast restricted area prior to the forced removal of Japanese Americans. After providing background on the prewar context and beginning of World War II, the bulk of the film focuses on the experiences of the families, most of whom moved to Utah or Colorado where they faced much hardship and discrimination, while also retaining their freedom. The film also specifically notes the case of Keetley Farms , a Nikkei settlement in Utah. The film is narrated in the first-person by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, who also reflects on her own family's wartime experience. The interviews are augmented by voice actors reading quotes from key officials and newspaper accounts from the time.

The film came out of a project conceptualized by sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn, who first encountered the story of what she calls "self-evacuees" through a Japanese American neighbor in Massachusetts named Mary Nagatomi. Staring in 2012, Glenn, along with her son Patrick Glenn, began interviewing self-evacuees and eventually completing thirty interviews. In around 2020, filmmaker Antonia Grace Glenn began working with her mother and brother on a documentary film based on the interviews, with funding from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program . Before They Take Us Away premiered at the DisOrient Asian American Film Festival in Eugene, Oregon, in April 2022 and was shown on Sacramento PBS station KVIE on May 18. ^[1]

Might also like Enduring Democracy: The Monterey Petition (2021); And Then They Came for Us (2017); Toyo's Camera: Japanese American History During WWII (2009)