Filming the past
Undergrad will present work in Amsterdam next month
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John Ochi will never forget the day a sheriff's deputy walked, uninvited, into his home and took his father away. Similarly, Sadie Yamane will always remember her father's teary eyes after boys at school beat her up for being Japanese.
Ochi and Yamane are two of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were forced into concentration camps when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in 1942. Along with eight others, they're featured in "Faces of the Past, Voices of the Present," a student-produced documentary that premiered February 8 at the Ohio Union.
A year ago, 42 Ohio State students filmed interviews with 10 Ohioans who'd been interned in the 1940s. They heard about everything from the "old and tough and smelly" curried mutton stew served at the camps, to stories of babies too dehydrated to cry.
Genna Duberstein, an honors student majoring in art and Spanish, saw only one problem: "The project felt incomplete." The interviews were filmed as individual mini-documentaries, and there was more than 30 hours of footage.
Duberstein worked with Dr. Judy Wu, a professor of history and Asian American studies, to give it the right ending. With the backing of a Technology Enhanced Learning Research grant, she spent the summer "editing, shooting, writing and recording voice-overs, and digging through online archives." She spliced the interviews together and added World War II-era propaganda footage to create the 56-minute film that premiers Wednesday.
The film is available at the University Libraries, and will be included in the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. In March, Duberstein will go to Amsterdam to present the documentary at the European Social Science History Conference.
"I never anticipated all this project would become," she said.
Related links:
The Institute for Japanese Studies Month of Remembrance Events.
Japanese American National Museum (off-site).
European Social Science History Conference (off-site).
