Topaz short film by Dave Tatsuno
—————————

Screenshot from the film

On 9/15 at BMU during our Sunday service at 10:30AM, we will show a short film, Topaz,  by Dave Tatsuno, courtesy of David Fujita.

“Businessman, community leader, and amateur movie maker. Dave Masaharu Tatsuno’s (1913–2006) home movies of concentration camp life at the Topaz , Utah, camp constitute one of the most important visual records of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.” — from Densho Encyclopedia

“Topaz is a 1945 documentary film, shot illegally by internee Dave Tatsuno (1913–2006), (though with the assistance of members of the camp staff), which documented life at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah during World War II. Tatsuno went through a unique and challenging filming process in order to produce his movie due to lack of freedom within the internment camps that hindered his ability to film his experiences. The film was deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress in 1996,^[1] and was the second amateur ^[2] film ever selected for the National Film Registry (after the “Zapruder” film of the JFK assassination).” – from Wikipedia