American Pastime (2007)

Directed by

Desmond Nakano

Genre

drama film, prison film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 45m

Rated

NR

Rating

6.6 of 10 from 7 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This film is about Japanese American families imprisoned in a Utah camp during World War II. It shows how they used baseball as a way to cope with the harsh conditions and loss of freedom.

sombernostalgicresilientgroundedslow-pacedbittersweetintimateevocativehistorical

What happens

American Pastime is a 2007 fictional film set in the Topaz War Relocation Center, a Utah prison camp which held thousands of people during the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. While the film is a dramatic narrative, it is based on true events and depicts life inside the internment camps, where baseball was one of the major diversions from the reality of the internees' lives. Producer Kerry Yo Nakagawa has said that a particular inspiration was Kenichi Zenimura and his family's experience at the Gila River War Relocation Center, where Zenimura led the construction of a baseball field and of a league of internee baseball teams that played there. Location scenes were filmed in bleak, desolate land, not far from the site of the actual internment camp. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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