Caught In Between

"We became the enemy that needed to be watched," long-time civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama says in Caught in Between. The morning when Pearl Harbor was attacked, she was awakened by three FBI agents who took her father away to the Terminal Island Federal Prison. In a few months, Yuri Kochiyama found herself shipped to an internment camp along with 120,000 civilians of Japanese ancestry. Sixty years later, after September 11, 2001, we find history beginning to repeat itself. Within a matter of weeks after 9/11, more than 1200 Arabs, Muslims, and those perceived to be Muslims were detained without charges or access to attorneys. 5000 men of middle eastern and South Asian origin were questioned by the FBI. Racially targeted attacks such as harassment of women wearing hijabs, assaults against men wearing turbans, and vandalism of mosques rose dramatically.

Caught in Between traces how in the wake of 9/11, two communities that had rarely crossed paths have come together in solidarity to speak out against the U.S. government’s attacks on civil rights and civil liberties. Speaking at San Francisco’s Japan Town Peace Plaza, Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, Japanese Americans, and others -- including Yuri Kochiyama and Souleiman Ghali from the San Francisco Islamic Society -- make passionate pleas to uphold our constitution and protect innocent people who are targeted as the "enemy." Marking Pearl Harbor Day 2001, the Japanese-American community present a thousand cranes to the Muslim community as a symbol of peace and solidarity. On a pilgrimage to the site of the former Tule Lake internment camp, American Muslim activist Amjad Obeidat walks through the remnants of the camp’s stockade, learns about the human rights abuses that took place within the camps, and confides, "I never dreamt that this could be my future."

The film weaves together personal stories of internment with perspectives from communities currently under attack. Former internees and their children, religious leaders, engineers, activists and ordinary people from both communities, now under the shadow of the "war on terrorism," revisit the dark days of Japanese-American internment in the hope that mass incarceration of innocent people will not be repeated. In making crucial connections between these two historical periods and among these voices and communities, "Caught in Between" tells a story about people who have been made enemies where they live, raises questions about "freedom" in a country whose citizens must live in fear, and captures the power of ordinary people standing together to uphold civil liberties and human rights.

Many Threads (formerly known as Institute for Equity, Ecology, Humor and Art