The feature documentary 80 YEARS LATER explores the racial inheritance of Japanese American family incarceration during World War II through multigenerational conversations with survivors and their descendants.

In the 80th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 that imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II, families still grapple with the legacy of their experience. How does one inherit traumatic history across generations?

Director Biography - Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Celine Parreñas Shimizu, film scholar and filmmaker, is Dean of the Division of the Arts and Distinguished Professor of Film and Media at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is formerly Professor and Director of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University and Professor of Asian American, Feminist and Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara.

She wrote The Proximity of Other Skins (2020), Straitjacket Sexualities (2012), and The Hypersexuality of Race (2007) and co-edited The Feminist Porn Book (2013) and The Unwatchability of Whiteness (2018). Her new book The Movies of Racial Childhoods: Screening Self-Sovereignty in Asian / America, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Her numerous peer-reviewed articles appear in top journals in the fields of cinema, performance, ethnic, feminist, sexuality studies, and transnational popular culture in Asia and Asian America. She is formerly Associate Editor of Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ), founding USA editor of Asian Diasporas and Visual Cultures of the Americas and Associate Editor of Women Studies International Forum.

Her latest film The Celine Archive (2020) won several festival awards and is distributed by Women Make Movies. She has served as a reviewer for the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, her M.F.A. in Film Directing and Production from UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.

Director Statement

The feature documentary 80 YEARS LATER explores how a Japanese American family continues to grapple with the racial inheritance of family incarceration during World War 2. Multigenerational dialogues help each generation contend with their inheritance—what their ancestors leave, and what they pass on to their descendants. Along the way, the film dramatizes the ongoing legacy of their family imprisonment, learning the importance of not just talking about what happened, but accepting the ambiguity of trauma and loss as a fact they simply feel and explore in their families for generations. The cinematic language of the film is composed of situating the families in the cities of their displacement and the archival images that explain the significance of those locations to their family's arrival there. A mirror sculpture shows the different meanings of the face for one multigenerational pair while a mother-daughter’s personal relationship is discussed at a site where they created a mural that charts Japanese American historical struggles. The conversations across generations show how how they each contend with the inheritance of their histories. Authorial intervention occurs via five sets of prompts that help guide the viewer to extract the themes of inheritance, its incompleteness and contentiousness as well as its life-giving and devastating forces.