Moving Walls

2017· 25 min·

Moving Walls tells the story of what happened to the scores of barracks used to house 120,000 Japanese Americans during WWII. At one camp built on government land in a remote area in Wyoming, they were sold for a dollar apiece to homesteaders. The story delves into the intersection of the mass detention and homesteading farmers and is told from the dual perspective of those taken from their homes and forced to live in these shoddily constructed buildings during wartime and those who voluntarily chose to start new lives in them after the war, i.e., the American nightmare that became the American dream. At a time when race and ethnicity continue to raise questions about issues surrounding immigration and civil rights, the film examines the mass detention through interviews with former incarcerees who returned to the West Coast as well as homesteaders who live in the buildings today in the heart of middle America.