Emmy-Winning Documentary gets Exclusive Q&A at SMC
Nik Venet, Maria Lebedev | Staff Writer
Ann Kaneko's film "Manzanar, Diverted" was given a special screening to SMC Students.
As part of SMC’s continuing Social Justice Lecture Series, Emmy-Award-winning documentary filmmaker Ann Kaneko performed a Q&A with students and faculty after screening her film “Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust.”
The SMC Social Justice Series explores the topic through lectures, discussions, and screenings of various media. Kaneko’s Sept. 14 presentation of her film in the Humanities & Social Science building comprised all three.
The documentary premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in 2021 and has since been an official selection in dozens of festivals worldwide.
The film catalogs 150 years of events and the lives of three intergenerational circles in the Owens Valley. First, the displaced indigenous peoples who first inhabited it, then the Japanese Americans who were forcibly moved there during World War II, and ultimately the local rancher communities that, while perhaps complicit in the displacement of indigenous people generations ago, became allies to the valley and its other stakeholders in the present day.
Kaneko makes a directorial choice to tell a non-linear story, which distinguishes the film from its peers. The beauty lies not in the historical telling of dates and facts, but rather when and where these groups overlap and commune.
Kaneko elaborated on these choices while responding to SMC students during the Q&A. “It really was about these threads and tracking these stories, being very vigilant about what really resonated with what this film was about.”
The film will screen again at the Japanese American National Museum as part of their Climates of Inequality Symposium on Sat. Sept. 30, 2023 at 2:30 p.m.
