The internment story they never taught you: families who ran before the trucks came.
At the start of World War II, Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were faced with the threat of forced removal and incarceration in concentration camps. A small number took their fate in their own hands, fleeing to interior states, becoming refugees in their own country, on a forced migration into the unknown. Before They Take Us Away is the first feature documentary to chronicle the untold stories of the “self-evacuees” who spent the war years outside the camps, as they struggled to rebuild their lives and overcome poverty, isolation, hostility and racial violence.
Direction
Glenn centers voices history tried to bury.
Production
Intimate archival work, no narrator preaching.
Director
Antonia Grace Glenn
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The 'self-evacuee' experience was deliberately excluded from the 1988 reparations framework, leaving many without official recognition. This film is essentially evidence for a case never fully heard.
Director Antonia Grace Glenn is herself descended from internees who did evacuate— her family's silence around this choice is what drove her to find others who'd talk.
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