About The Film
THE MANZANAR FISHING CLUB began as a lecture, walking tour and artifacts exhibit to raise awareness of the internees who slipped away under the cover of night to find freedom and adventure matching wits with the prized trout of the Sierra Nevada’s high-altitude lakes and streams.
The project moved to the next level when fellow anglers and video production company principals Lester Chung and John Gengl proposed interviewing the surviving internee fishermen for a documentary film.
Writer Richard Imamura pored over hours and hours of interviews and expanded the project from a 22-minute short into a feature length documentary. His script brought together what Shiozaki had intuitively known all along — that all of the fishermen’s stories touched, in one way or another, on a yearning to be free.