Manzanar Fishing Club (film)

Feature length documentary film on Manzanar inmates who temporarily escaped from the confines of the camp to fish in the nearby streams and mountains. In addition to interviews with former inmate fishermen (and women) and archival images, The Manzanar Fishing Club also tells its story using animation and recreated scenes with actors. The film had a limited theatrical release in April 2012 and was released on DVD on October 30, 2012. It was funded in part by grants from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program and the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant program .

The initial inspiration for the film came from a 2004 Los Angeles Times article that included a photograph of a Manzanar inmate identified only as Ishikawa holding a golden trout. Cory Shiozaki, a television cameraman and avid fisherman, was intrigued by the photograph, since he knew that golden trout could only be found at elevations over 8,000 feet. How had this concentration camp denizen managed to land such a fish? Over the next several years, he began to research the story of fishing at Manzanar, eventually finding former Manzanar fishermen, including the identity of Ishikawa. A resident of Eastern Sierra, Shiozaki became a volunteer docent at the Manzanar National Historic Site and created a program on fishing at Manzanar. Through publicity about his research, he joined forces with Lester Chung and John Gengl of Talk Story, Inc., who along with childhood friend Richard Imamura, formed the creative team for the film. The team eventually interviewed twenty-six former inmates or family members and accumulated some seventy hours of interview footage for the film

Manzanar Fishing Club was widely reviewed to a mixed response. Reviewers praised the film's posing of fishing as a symbol of freedom and subversion as well as the unobtrusive style of filmmaking and its unique and narrow focus as a means to tell the larger story of incarceration. ^[1] At the same time, many reviewers felt that film was too long and became mired in minutiae about technical aspects of fishing. ^[2]

Might also like Hidden Legacy: Japanese Traditional Arts in the World War II Internment Camps (2014); Searchlight Serenade (2012); Diamonds in the Rough: Zeni and the Legacy of Japanese-American Baseball (1999)