Resettlement: Chicago Story

Several years after the U.S. government’s forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, the Yamamoto family runs a struggling dry-cleaning business in Chicago.

About the Director
Reina Higashitani is a Japanese writer/director whose works explore community-involved narrative filmmaking. Her previous short film “Frog Catcher” about a transgender man from the 19th century was broadcast on KCET and screened at film festivals worldwide winning multiple awards including Audience Award at Amsterdam LGBTQ Film Festival and Creative Excellence Award from Japan Association of Audiovisual Producers (JAAP). She has also produced and associate produced a number of independent films and TV documentaries including Francis Ford Coppola’s “Distant Vision,” Academy Award-nominated documentary “Redemption” (HBO), and a Tokyo Video Festival Excellence Award-winning documentary “Shall We Sing?”(PBS), which she also directed. Reina holds an M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University Tisch School of the Arts and an M.F.A. in Film and TV Directing from University of California, Los Angeles. She is an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University Sidney Poitier New American Film School.

Plays in

Rediscovering History

In REDISCOVERING HISTORY, we find multigenerational conversations between concentration camp survivors and their descendants, as well as two…