23 minutes that'll wreck your whole understanding of who gets to belong.
Follows Iwao Ichikawa, a second-generation Japanese Mexican, navigating racial segregation in Mexicali, Baja California during WWII, offering a poignant exploration of identity and belonging amidst adversity.
Direction
Lino lets silence do the screaming — devastating restraint.
Editing
Archival whispers against present-day stillness, time collapses beautifully.
Director
José Miguel Lino
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Mexicali's Japanese-Mexican community — the nisei — faced deportation to U.S. internment camps despite Mexican citizenship, a history still barely taught in either country's schools.
The title's deliberate parenthetical insists on translation as intervention — 'second-generation' never quite equals nisei, and that gap is the whole film.
MX
