DOJ Film Fund Raiser

I am Claudia Katayanagi, a award winning San Francisco Bay Area film maker working on her follow up film after "A Bitter Legacy" about the true Internment Prisons for mostly Japanese residents who they were thrown into over a hundred different United States Military and Department of Justice prisons throughout the U.S. mainland and elsewhere from the day of December 7, 1941 through 1947. These people were called "enemy aliens", even though many were longtime residents of America, but were unable to become American citizens due to the anti-Asian policies of the U.S. government decades before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Even American citizens of Japanese descent were placed in these prisons, as were Latin Japanese citizens, who were kidnapped from their Latin American homes.

While I had a grant from the National Park Service-Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant, my former fiscal sponsor suddenly announced that they would no longer be fiscal sponsors and so I lost a major portion of my grant to finish my film. In addition, Covid-19 restrictions made it next to impossible to record additional interviews safely for the last 18 months, adding to the delay of production and post production. I can now follow Covid-19 film production protocols to safely film these additional interviews.

I have a 35 minute work in progress but need to conduct a number of crucial interviews to complete the story. These funds will help record these interviews and fill in major gaps in the timeline, and help to cover the post-production costs to bring this project to the finish line.

This story will add to the history of the Japanese -American imprisonment history of WWII, that my film "A Bitter Legacy" did not cover, explaining more deeply the differences and similarities between incarceration and internment. Dozens of previously little known Military and Department of Justice prisons will be shown and discussed by renown historians, survivors and descendants of these prisons.

The last section of the film will draw parallels to the Department of Justice prisons, or "Detention Centers" of today and show how former Japanese American prisoners and their descendants of these DOJ sites are now demonstrating with other immigrant rights groups to stop the separation and of families and their long imprisonment today.

When finished, this film will be entered into numerous film festivals around the globe and Japanese American community groups and pilgrimages and hopefully, find distribution with its companion piece, "A Bitter Legacy".

Please help me finish this important work.

Thank you for your support!

Claudia Katayanagi

Director