Love in a cage: when war erases your future, who do you become?
This is the fictional story of a young Japanese American man called Frank Sugiyama who, after Pearl Harbor, is separated from his white American girlfriend Grace Williams. He has always dreamed of a future with Grace, to buy a house together and to start a family. He is sent to an incarceration camp and, on the way, meets Japanese American Mai Ikeda, who is with her mother, auntie and two young children. Mai's husband, Sam Ikeda, has been taken to a higher security camp because of his work running a bookshop that sells goods imported from Japan. In camp, Frank and Mai make friends and Frank becomes a sort of surrogate father to her children. This friendship deepens into something more complicated and romantic, but both are promised to other people...
Direction
Sharpe's delicate balance of beauty and brutality
Writing
Dialogue so spare it wounds
Director
Will Sharpe
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The film's camp designs reference actual photographs from Manzanar and Tule Lake, with production designers consulting survivors' oral histories.
Sharke reportedly cut a scene showing Frank and Mai's first kiss after test audiences found it 'too hopeful'; the ambiguity was intentional.
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