Midi Onodera’s The Displaced View details the experience of three generations of Japanese Canadians, starting primarily with her grandmother’s Issei generation—the first large scale group of Japanese immigrants to Canada—through her mother’s Nisei generation and her own Sensei peers. Collaged from the oral histories of a number of women, the film tells the story of the difficulty of making a home in Canada—both in the hostility of internment during the War and the more generalized racism after and in the dispersion of historical traditions that dissolve across generations. A sensitive, subtle film designed as a vessel for cultural reflection, The Displaced View resonates anew as our country again contemplates how we will welcome our next potential citizens.

“I imagine that before WW II, many immigrants did not expect to be treated kindly by their adopted country. But for whatever reason they could not return to their place of birth and instead learned to live with intolerance and discrimination. Most people of my grandmother’s generation developed a strong sense of pride for their new homeland. But as the generations get further away from that first generation of New Canadians, we find it difficult to believe that life could have been worse in their birth country.”—Midi Onodera