TV Eye
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By Belinda Acosta, Fri., July 2, 1999
Omori's film memoir recounts the period during World War II when thousands of Japanese-Americans and Japanese natives were interned in camps throughout California and the West, and the scars it left behind. Archival footage and recovered home movies offer remarkable glimpses of camp life, which Omori experienced firsthand as a young girl along with her parents and sister Chizuko Omori.
"At first, this was going to be a film about the painful choices that Japanese Americans had to make during internment," Omori said. "It wasn't until I interviewed my sister Chizu that I realized that our own story was a snapshot of that time," she said.
The breakdown of the Omori family, including the mysterious death of their mother only a year after the Omoris were released, becomes the reflecting pool into which the larger experience of Japanese internment is examined. Interviews and news clippings reconstruct the events which engendered complicated feelings of distrust, displacement, and later, the rage that was felt by the Japanese toward their American captors, and toward each other. One of the most painful events discussed in the film is the internal split between the Japanese Americans Citizens League (JACL), which promoted full compliance with camp administrators, and those who chose to resist.
While the film is painstakingly constructed, it often slows under the weight of its earnest attention to detail. What refreshes the film are the many breathtaking images Omori uses to express feelings of upheaval, abandonment, or loneliness: a field of broken cups and saucers; photos of resistors trapped in shaved ice; a photo of Omori's mother submerged underwater, with what look to be pebbles dropped into the water (they turn out to be teeth).
Other POV films during the month of July include: School Prayer: A Community at War (7/20, 10pm) and The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez (7/27, 10pm). All screenings are on KLRU-TV.
Lourdes Portillo's Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena, originally scheduled for a July 13 airdate, has been postponed until August 3, according to Stephanie Wright Blado, director of communications at KLRU-TV. More on this film and the curious circumstances surrounding its pull from the July POV lineup as well as from CineFestival, the film festival hosted by San Antonio's Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center two weeks ago, will be discussed in a future "TV Eye."
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