Female Film Critics 24/375
The internment of Japanese Americans in Idaho and other states during World War II is a dark part of our American history. Bamboo and Barbed Wire, a 2019 documentary by Karen Day, is having a renaissance of interest at the 2021 Bentonville Film Festival in large part due to the concern over the spiking Asian hate crimes and the afterburner legacy of the Trump Muslim ban.
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Karen Day’s Bamboo and Barbed Wire is an all-American horror story. During World War II, the Minidoka internment camp, located just outside of Twin Falls, Idaho, became home to Japanese-American families ripped from their real homes on the West coast. Their story of sacrifice and this chronicling of the injustices they suffered is a solid call to action for concerned Americans who never want the past to repeat itself.
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Karen Day has done everything from war-zone reporting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda, and more to co-authoring a book (Seal: The Unspoken Sacrifice) to raising four children. She turned her attention to feature filmmaking with 2014’s Girl from God’s Country — a documentary about pioneering female filmmaker Nell Shipman. Now, with Bamboo and Barbed Wire, she explores the parallels between Japanese American internment during World War II and our current political climate and attitude toward refugees
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