Hawai’i International Film Festival 41,
November 2021

WE CAME BACK FOR YOU

World Premiere: November 4 - 28, 2021

Featured in the HIFF 41 Documentary Panorama Shorts program

We Came Back for You is a film poem based on a poem by the same name by Satsuki Ina, a psychotherapist and activist who is one of the featured “heroes” in the exhibition, Transcendients: Heroes at Borders. The film features Ina reciting her poem over a montage of photographs of her during and after her incarceration during World War II, footage preserved in the archives of the Japanese American National Museum, and images of Ina’s current activism that connect the travesty of democracy then to the present-day crisis occurring on the U.S.-Mexico border, where immigrant refugee families are being separated and held in detention centers indefinitely.

World Premiere HIFF41
Hawai'i, USA, 2021


  • Producer     Taiji Terasaki and Karen Ishizuka
    Poem author Satsuki Ina
    Performer Satsuki Ina
    Director Akira Boch and Taiji Terasaki
    Editor (live mist version) Evan Kodani
    Editor (film version) Christiaan Kuypers, Taylor Oishi
    Additional Photography Taylor Oishi
    Sound Designer Yuka Murakami
    Music Dave Iwataki

    2020 production Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
    2021 production © Taiji Terasaki