Kintsukuroi (film)

Feature-length family saga centering on a Japanese American family's wartime incarceration odyssey.

In an undated present, an elderly Nisei woman fixes a broken ceramic bowl, while her granddaughter reminds her that she is to tell her story (presumably in an oral history) the next morning at 9 am. As the woman narrates, the story begins. We learn she is Wendy Ito, one of two children of Issei parents in San Francisco before the war. The family runs a store and Wendy is going to college when the war begins. The story follows the Itos through their forced removal to Topaz , where her brother Ken volunteers to join the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and incorporates many aspects of the Japanese American World War II story from the loyalty questionnaire to the experience of Nisei soldiers in Europe, Nisei draft resistance and the difficulties of the immediate postwar period. There is also a parallel story about another family, the Ibatas, who end up at Heart Mountain . The older Wendy narrates throughout, eventually returning to the present.

A former journalist, filmmaker Kerwin Berk began making films in the 2010s, including a prior feature film titled Infinity and Chashu Ramen (2013) and various shorts. Kintsukuroi began as a thirty minute short that was expanded to a feature after the pandemic. Berk received a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission to begin the film, but completed it on a shoestring budget, with the cast and crew volunteering their time. The film's world premiere took place in San Francisco on April 28, 2024, and it screened at various Bay Area locations throughout 2024. The title refers to the Japanese art form of using gold and lacquer to repair broken ceramics, creating a more beautiful object in the process, a metaphor for what happened to the Japanese American community after the war. ^[1]

Might also like Farewell to Manzanar (1976); Only the Brave (2006); Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980)