‘The Manzanar Fishing Club,’ reviewed by Marshall Fine

HollywoodandFine.com


It seems like an innocuous title – until you realize (or learn) that “The Manzanar Fishing Club,” a new documentary by Cory Shiozaki opening today in limited release, deals with one of this country’s most shameful chapters: the internment of Japanese citizens after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Shiozaki’s film uses archival footage and interviews with survivors – or children of survivors – to look at the impact of the law, enacted after Pearl Harbor in early 1942, that forced naturalized and American-born Japanese to leave their homes and their belongings behind when they were forcibly moved to the American equivalent of concentration camps.

Manzanar was 140 miles northeast of Los Angeles, a former Native American reservation that became a collecting place for those rounded up in Los Angeles and surrounding areas. The camp was a collection of army-like barracks, surrounded by barbed wire, in the middle of nowhere. But it also happened to be near a terrific trout-fishing stream – which led a group of the internees to form their own clandestine group to sneak out of the camp on a regular basis and go fishing.

The film looks at the larger issue of internment – and the fear and racism that went into that decision. There were, after all, no similar camps for Americans of German birth or ancestry. But because Japanese looked different and could be categorized easily as “the other,” they were targeted for this kind of treatment. It would be decades before the American government apologized.

This review continues on my website.

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