Film: Defiant to the Last

Watch Defiant to the Last: Resistance at the Tule Lake Jail, a documentary that uncovers the history of resistance at the Tule Lake Segregation Center and highlights the Japanese Americans who were punished for speaking out against wartime incarceration. Stay for a panel discussion with Barbara Takei, Dr. Satsuki Ina and Emiko Omori, moderated by CAAM Executive Director Donald Young, followed by an audience Q&A.

NR, 37 mins., 2025. Closed captions (CC) in English. 

Emiko Omori is a filmmaker and cinematographer whose work explores the history and legacy of Japanese American incarceration. Her documentary Rabbit in the Moon, co-produced with Chizu Omori, received a national Emmy and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Barbara Takei is a Sansei public historian whose work focuses on Japanese American history and social movements. She has been active in community-based research and education, drawing on her early involvement in the Asian American movement in the late 1960s by revolutionary thinker Grace Lee Boggs and is a graduate of Howard University, an HBCU.

Satsuki Ina is a psychotherapist, filmmaker and community activist who focuses on trauma and social justice. She co-founded Tsuru for Solidarity and has produced award-winning documentaries on Japanese American incarceration, including Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. Her latest book, The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest, was published in 2024.

Donald Young is the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM)’s Executive Director. As a longtime documentary production executive and advocate for independent storytelling, Young has played a key role in building CAAM’s stature as a national producer of documentaries and independent feature films. His credits include executive producing the 2022 Peabody Awards Nominee Rising Against Asian Hate, and the 2020 landmark PBS series Asian Americans. 

Connect: Defiant to the Last - Website | Emiko and Chizuko Omori Collection - Website | Donald Young - Website 

Celebrating its 44th year in 2026, CAAMFest is the nation’s leading showcase for films from Asian America and beyond. This year’s festival takes place May 7-10 in San Francisco Japantown, the nation’s largest, longest-running festival dedicated to showcasing new Asian American and Asian films. Presented annually by the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), this San Francisco Bay Area event celebrates AAPI Heritage Month through film screenings, panels, and special events.

Stretching from California’s southern border to northmost tip of Washington state, One Book, One Coast is a brand-new, multi-state community reading initiative that brings readers together around a shared book, sparking conversation, programs and reflection across the West Coast.

Our inaugural selection is They Called Us Enemy (2019), a graphic memoir by George Takei that recounts his childhood experience of incarceration alongside more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of whom were U.S. citizens, following Executive Order 9066 in 1942. 

Read along March–May 2026 and join the programs and discussions it inspires.