Day of Independence

Day of Independence (2003)

A desert. A baseball diamond. A friendship. America, 1943.

Zip, a 17 year-old Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) baseball pitcher, faces the tragic circumstances of the World War II internment of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry. Set in a relocation camp in the summer of 1943, this film chronicles the journey of an American family torn apart by a forced and unjust incarceration, a father's decision that challenges his son to find strength, and ultimately his son's triumph through courage, sacrifice and the All-American game of baseball.

Date of release
2003-09-26
TMDB
10.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
27m
Genres
Drama, Family, History
Director
Chris Tashima

Casting

Interesting facts

Day of Independence is a 2003 short film, broadcast in 2005 as a half-hour PBS television special. It is a drama, set during the Japanese American internment of World War II, produced by Cedar Grove Productions with Visual Communications as fiscal sponsor.

Trivia

Performance artist Dan Kwong, who is also a baseball player, coached lead actor Derek Mio in old-style pitching form.

Lisa Joe's character, "Frances" (who sings the National Anthem at the ballgame and later conducts a choir rehearsal), was named in honor of Joe's mother, Frances Sue Okabe, a well known Nisei singer and music teacher. Okabe was interned at the Minidoka internment camp as a teenager, where she was known for her singing.

During one of the montage sequences of "camp life," there is a painter standing by an easel, who is portrayed by playwright Tim Toyama, who stepped in at the last moment when the person cast to play the part didn't show up for filming.

The scene depicting the choir rehearsal has un-credited cameo appearances by noted actors Tamlyn Tomita, Emily Kuroda, Sab Shimono and Greg Watanabe who are friends of the director.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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