The Stranger

This documentary about a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II completely buries the lead. Filmmakers Joe Fox and James Nubile spend more than half of the movie on the experiences of surviving internees, who were in their teens or younger when they were forcibly relocated to a camp in Arizona. The stories are compelling, but they're not unlike those found in any number of documentaries about the internment. It isn't until the final act that the documentary gets to the point. The federal government had chosen Japanese-Americans to send to Poston based on their knowledge of agriculture, and the men were put to work developing the land for a new population center in the surrounding Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation. The government's use of forced labor--on top of its unconstitutional incarceration of innocent civilians--is the real story here. Unfortunately, the filmmakers never really pause for outrage or analysis, hurrying instead to document the gratitude of the next generation of Indians for the involuntary contribution that those Japanese-American men made to their reservation. By Annie Wagner