About Making Home from War

Written by twelve Japanese American elders, Making Home from War is a collection of stories about their exodus from concentration camps into a world which, in a few short years, had drastically changed.

Kiku Hori Funabiki grew up in San Francisco’s Japantown until 1942, when she was incarcerated in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, concentration camp. After her release, Kiku attended Queens College and eventually resettled with her family in the Bay Area, where she matriculated at UC Berkeley. In 1984, as a representative for former inmates, she went toe to toe with the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C, to challenge the injustice of the forced removal.

Brian Komei Dempster is a Sansei (third-generation Japanese American). He received B.A.s in American ethnic studies and English at the University of Washington and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan. His poems have been published in various journals and anthologies. Dempster is the editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps, which received a 2007 Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society. He is currently an associate professor of rhetoric and composition and a faculty member in Asian American studies at the University of San Francisco.

About Resident Aliens

In 2002, the United States began deporting former Cambodian refugees with criminal offenses, even those who had arrived as children or infants following the Cambodian genocide. Resident Aliens follows three such “returnees” as they adapt to an unfamiliar homeland after nearly a lifetime spent in the States; largely shunned by Cambodian society, with few skills and little money, they now must find a way to survive, or end up on the streets.

Ross Tuttle is a New York-based journalist and documentary filmmaker. Resident Aliens makes its world premiere at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. His articles have appeared in the Nation, New York Times, Baltimore Sun, St. Petersburg Times and LA Weekly.

About Fumiko Hayashida: The Woman Behind the Symbol. (Lucy Ostrander)

Fumiko Hayashida unwittingly became an iconic figure of Japanese internment after a photograph of her carrying her sleeping daughter to Manzanar was featured in countless museums and magazines. At the age of 97, Hayashida continues to speak out on behalf of the 60,000 U.S. citizens who were forced into relocation camps during World War II.

The films are being presented as part of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.  

For more information, email njahs@njahs.org or call (415) 921-5007.