Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust (film)

Documentary film on Manzanar that focuses on the region's relationship with water and with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which owns much of the land and water rights in the area. The film also juxtaposes the forced removal of Japanese Americans to Manzanar with the forced removal of Native Americans from the Manzanar area in the 19th Century. The film also looks at the contemporary water related issues that saw Japanese Americans, Native Americans, and local white environmentalists come together. Much of the Japanese American perspective comes from Sue Kunitomi Embrey , the co-founder of the Manzanar Committee , and her family.

Filmmaker Ann Kaneko's family had been incarcerated at the Rohwer and Jerome , Arkansas, concentration camps, and she remembered visiting the Manzanar site as a child. She told Sabrina Jacobs that she had been "reticent to make a film about Japanese American incarceration" given how many have already been made and "didn't want to be defined" by that experience. But her work on A Flicker in Eternity , an earlier film set during the incarceration, changed her mind, and she became "interested in trying to find a different way to tell this story." In working closely the the various communities in the making of the film, co-producer Jin Yoo-Kim described a "collaborative, community based way of filmmaking" that was "our own way of practicing decolonization in our filmmaking practice." ^[1]

A one-hour version of Manzanar Divided aired nationally on PBS on July 18, 2022 as part of the POV series.

Might also like Passing Poston (2008); Remembering Manzanar (2004); Relocation, Arkansas: Aftermath of Incarceration (2016)