Inside a U.S. concentration camp, two Japanese American schoolmates clash over loyalty to the United States. Will their friendship survive?

A short film by Konrad Aderer

Production company: LabHeart Media 
Director: Konrad Aderer
Director of Photography: Scott Shelley
Preproduction Coordinator: Heather von Rohr
Production Sound: Xiao Han
Actors: Taiju Nakane, Hiro Takashima

Director's statement

I wrote and directed this film to explore, in an intimate drama between two people, the moment a whole community became divided against itself. The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is part of my own family history, but a lot of the essential questions have remained unexplored even eighty years later. Because of the war, my family lost its connection with Japan -- its language, its culture. My work as a documentary filmmaker led me to the repressed history of Japanese Americans who struggled to find their way between the two empires, who expressed themselves in Japanese and looked critically at the mythologies of each. In this and future projects I intend to use drama to bring the experiences of bilingual, transnational Nikkei to light and crack open the orthodoxies of patriotism and assimilation.

Cast & crew bios

Konrad Aderer (Director, writer) 

Konrad is an Emmy and Telly award-winning filmmaker whose documentary Resistance at Tule Lake was broadcast on PBS from 2017-2020. He began his career as a stage and film actor, appearing in principal roles in films including the Independent Spirit Award-nominated feature Ignatz and Lotte, and in classical roles Off Broadway and in regional theatres across New England. He is excited to be returning to drama as a director, launching Kino Kibei, a new multi-film project telling the stories of transnational Japanese Americans during World War II.

Scott Shelley (Director of Photography) 

Scott is a cinematographer and producer working in documentary, television, and independent feature films. He has an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and has received two Primetime Emmy nominations and won one Emmy for Outstanding Nonfiction Cinematography.

His early career centered around overseas projects for the UN Center Against Apartheid, UNTV and Unicef. He has worked in more than 80 countries, often in remote areas under difficult circumstances.

Documentary work includes: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Lewis Gates Jr. for PBS, Morgenthau (PBS), The Ride (Showtime), Primal Contact (AE), Burning the Future (Sundance), Under Fire for HBO Documentary, and Le Ride for Phil Keoghan.

His television career includes 12 seasons as a principal cinematographer for The Amazing Race, and has been the Director of Photography for 17 television series including National Geographic Explorer, Phil Keoghan's Adventure Crazy and No Opportunity Wasted, which won the Hor Concours at the Banff World Media Festival. He is currently the Director of Photography of CBS's Tough As Nails.

Mitsuhiro Honda (Japanese consultant)

Mitsuhiro Honda is a Japanese filmmaker based in Tokyo, Japan. He tells unique stories and small voices by producing creative visual images. When he went to Sophia University in Tokyo, he majored in Japanese history and graduated at the top of his class. With his knowledge and expertise, he works for his clients and independent filmmakers as an editor. Since 2019, he has been collaborating with Konrad Aderer for this Kino Kibei project and he has written Japanese dialogues in CHŪSEI (loyalty) as a co-writer. Now he is also working on his directing short film "Doppelgänger", which is based on his real life experience.

Taiju Nakane (Tomio Kimura)

Taiju Nakane is an actor currently based in New York. Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, he made his film debut when he was six years old in After the Rain, a film whose screenplay was written by Akira Kurosawa and directed by Takashi Koizumi. Since then, he has appeared in television, films, and commercials, including Taira no Kiyomori (NHK), High School Restaurant (NTV), and Baseball Brainiacs (NTV). His latest work as a lead in The Chicken, directed by Neo Sora, had its world premiere at Locarno International Film Festival 2020 and subsequently screened at festivals worldwide, including New York Film Festival 2020, AFI Fest 2020, among others.

Hiro Takashima (Sgt. Yoshida)

Hiro Takashima is a bilingual actor based in NYC. Born and raised in Nagasaki, Japan. He graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. He has appeared in numerous plays around the city, produced by the Manhattan Repertory Theater and the Lifelines Productions. His film credits include the lead in a short film Sinking which is expected to be released this summer.