Heart Mountain is a spectacular and beautiful backdrop to a story of triumph and tragedy. Seventy years ago, an internment camp filled with 10,000 Japanese Americans sat in the shadow of the mountain. It was just a few miles outside Cody, Wyoming, where the land is rugged and the weather is brutal. It's where American citizens were imprisoned behind barbed wire and guard towers for no other reason than their heritage. The Hirahara Photo Collection tells the story of Heart Mountain through pictures. In this collection were amazing images taken by Patti Hirahara's father and grandfather while inmates at Heart Mountain. They built a secret dark room under their barracks where they developed the film. In the years they were imprisoned, they took thousands of photos of camp life. Each photo is an opportunity to see the daily struggles of innocent people dealing with internment, and how they worked so hard to ignore the obvious and make life livable. In this documentary, we travel to Wyoming to visit the place where this camp once stood. Now there's a museum and interpretive center to keep the memory of the camp and what happened there alive. Most vivid, however, are the stories from people who once called Heart Mountain "home". From heart warming to heart breaking, their experience of life in an American concentration camp reminds us of the fragility of freedom. To know the story of Heart Mountain is to know the story of an entire generation of Japanese Americans during World War Two - that's 120 thousand innocent people locked up in 10 different concentration camps. In today's world where society continues to struggle over issues of race, fueled by hate and fear, the lessons we learned 70 years ago are just as relevant today. Japanese American internment is one of the most profound chapters in American history, yet is hardly touched by our history books. This film's mission is to keep that story alive.
