Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust

Summary

Director Ann Kaneko discussed the nearly six-year process of making Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust. The project began as an interdisciplinary humanities collaboration focused on Manzanar and its pilgrimage. Kaneko was initially hesitant to revisit Japanese American incarceration in a film, but became interested in connecting that history with Native American experiences and the region’s contested water and land.

The film’s central creative choices include:

• Making place the main character: Rather than build a conventional character-driven or chronological narrative, Kaneko and her editors shaped the film around the land and water. People’s stories and testimonies lead viewers through the place’s history.
• Weaving together communities and generations: The film brings Japanese American, Native American, and local environmental perspectives into relation. Intergenerational ties emerged through the research and editing, and Kaneko describes balancing the communities’ stories as an ongoing process.
• Using structure to create meaning: The film moves back and forth across time. Kaneko emphasizes how transitions, juxtapositions, and contrasts between ideas can make meaning in documentary editing.
• Building the story through archival research: The team drew on government photographs and footage, family photographs, institutional collections, and community archives. Kaneko sought less familiar images and checked that they accurately represented the people and places shown. She also notes that when photographs are scarce, oral stories can serve as testimony to history.
• Using sound to evoke place and memory: Sound collages—including water, laughter, and sounds associated with violence—help move viewers across locations and histories. Kaneko values sound’s immersive, image-making quality.
• Creating an improvised score: Pandemic restrictions led the musicians to collaborate remotely. Percussion set a rhythmic foundation; cello, guitar, sound textures, and the Indigenous instrument the Ibinda were layered in, alongside shakuhachi and songs shared by community artists. The separate tracks were then mixed together.

Kaneko also described the film as a way to encourage local remembrance and bring communities into conversation about environmental and climate justice. She urged viewers to question water extraction, development, and consumption, and stressed that meaningful change requires collective action.

Creators and Contributors Mentioned

• Film and event: Ann Kaneko (director); Kelsey Moore (moderator); Emily Zinn (audience-question facilitator); Jim Lee (scholar who invited Kaneko into the project); Joanne Oppenheim (invited Kaneko to work on A Flicker in Eternity); Jin (producer).
• Featured community members and subjects: Kathy Bancroft, Nancy, Mary, Rose, Sue, Bruce, Monica, and Sage Romero.
• Music and sound: Lori Goldstein, Matt Chamberlain, Suzie Kozel, Alex Miranda, George Abe, Steve Fisk, and Chian Stone. Songs were also shared by members of the Akamai group.
• Archival photographers and figures discussed: Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Francis Stewart, Clem Albers, and Toyo Miyatake. Ralph Merritt was also mentioned in connection with Manzanar’s photography.