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Movies|Robert Nakamura, ‘Godfather’ of Asian American Film, Dies at 88
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/movies/robert-nakamura-dead.html
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After the outbreak of World War II, Robert Nakamura and his family, like 120,000 other people of Japanese descent, were forcibly removed from their home and placed in a remote internment camp.
It was 1942, the year Mr. Nakamura turned 6. He would later recall that on the roughly 250-mile trip north to the camp from Los Angeles in a convoy of buses, one gas station owner refused to let any of the displaced people aboard them use the bathrooms.
On Mr. Nakamura’s second day of internment, he cried after getting lost amid the camp’s identical tar paper barracks. When he brought home a poor report card from his camp school, his mother, who gave birth to another son while the family was interned, sobbed with despair for more reasons than bad grades.
Making sense of this early, indelible trauma became the leitmotif of a trailblazing career during which Mr. Nakamura became widely known as the godfather of Asian American media.
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As an independent filmmaker, photographer, teacher and activist, he explored issues of justice, identity, memory and racism. He was a founder of Visual Communications, the oldest community-based organization of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists in the United States.
