SILENT SACRIFICE - STORIES OF JAPANESE AMERICAN INCARCERATION illuminates a dark chapter in American history. In February 1942, just 10 weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of any or all people considered a threat to national security from designated military areas. The military in turn defined the entire West Coast, home to the majority of Americans of Japanese ancestry or citizenship, as a military area. By June, nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to remote internment camps built by the U.S. military in scattered locations around the country. SILENT SACRIFICE shares the experiences of Japanese Americans who were living in the San Joaquin Valley prior to Executive Order 9066. Interviewees discuss what drew them to the area, the businesses and farms their families established, and both the discrimination many faced in their adopted land as well as the friendships they formed. They then reveal the shock and confusion felt in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the tragic and disorienting uprooting of lives as families were forced to abandon their homes and move into temporary assembly centers before being sent to permanent internment camps. After release from the camps, many people buried their painful memories as they tried to move on from this period in their lives. In SILENT SACRIFICE, cameras follow a couple as they return to the Jerome and Rowher concentration camps in Arkansas, nearly seven decades after being incarcerated there during the 1940s.
