Artist in Person (tentative)

In 1923, Asayo, the filmmaker's obachan (grandmother), leaves Hiroshima for a fishing town in British Columbia. Obachan's Garden is her story, which director Linda Ohama begins at the momentous 100th birthday party that Asayo pointedly refuses to attend. Weaving through Asayo's remarkable past, from her arrival in Canada as a picture bride (and subsequent refusal to marry the man who brought her), through her life in a WWII internment camp, to her present days in a nursing home, Obachan's Garden merges family interviews, Asayo's musings, and dramatic reenactments to reveal a deeply compelling personal history. While Japanese American filmmakers have focused on the WWII internment of Japanese Americans as their community's defining moment, Ohama's highly personalized retelling paradoxically gives such traumas a far greater breadth and depth, highlighting one woman's life to illuminate the richness and complexities of the Japanese North American experience.