RIVERSIDE — “Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust” (2021, 84 minutes) will be screened on Saturday, Oct. 14, at 4:30 p.m. at Culver Center of the Arts on the UC Riverside campus.
The free screening of Ann Kaneko’s documentary (with Spanish subtitles) will be presented with the launch of the Manzanar, Diverted Augmented Reality visual sound bath.
Before the screening, Alexander Miranda, member of the composing team and a Payómkawichum (Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) artist, will play his array mbira, accompanying visuals from the 360-degree visual sound bath.
There will be Q&A with Kaneko and Miranda. After the screening, Kaneko and producer/impact producer Jin Yoo-Kim will be on hand with VR headsets for those who would like to view the AR visual sound bath of scenes of Payahüünadü in VR mode. The 360 videos will also be posted and released online.
At the foot of the majestic snow-capped Sierras, Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp, becomes the confluence for memories of Payahuunadü, the now-parched “land of flowing water.” Intergenerational women from Native American, Japanese American and rancher communities form an unexpected alliance to defend their land and water from Los Angeles.
NPR called “Manzanar, Diverted” “a fascinating documentary looking at Los Angeles’ fraught history of how it gets its water sources.”
Accompanies the “Climates of Inequality” exhibition, organized by the Humanities Action Lab, UC Riverside, and 21 other localities. Program co-sponsored by UCR Pollitt Endowed Term Chair for Interdisciplinary Research and Learning.
The UCR Arts AAPI Film Series is generously supported by the Voy and Fay Wong Family Endowment.
For link to tickets, go to: https://ucrarts.ucr.edu/films/manzanar-diverted/
Ann Kaneko is known for her personal films that weave her intimate aesthetic with the complex intricacies of political reality. An Emmy Award winner, her poetic feature, “Manzanar, Diverted,” was broadcast on PBS POV’s 2022 lineup. She is currently developing “45/45,” a personal film about multigenerational families and cycles of life, and “Land, Labor and Logistics,” for which she is an 18th Street Arts Center California Creative Corps fellow.
Credits include “A Flicker in Eternity,” “Against the Grain: An Artist’s Survival Guide to Peru,” “Overstay,” and “100% Human Hair.” Fluent in Japanese and Spanish, Kaneko has been a Fulbright, Japan Foundation Artist, Film Independent Doc Lab and Jackson Wild Multicultural fellow. Funders include JustFilms/Ford, Doc Society, the Redford Center, Center for Asian American Media, Vision Maker Media, Firelight Media, Chicken and Egg, and Hoso Bunka Foundation. She teaches at the Claremont colleges and was the artist mentor for Visual Communications’ Armed with a Camera Fellowship.
Alexander Miranda is a contemporary artist from Southern California working in music composition and experimental music performance. He creates compositions with his array mbira, a handcrafted modern musical instrument with a unique harp- or bell-like sound. It is a radical redesign of the Shona African mbira from Zimbabwe and is part of the lamellaphone family. He uses samples and found recordings in his work. His portfolio honors and celebrates the power, resilience, and beauty of Indigenous people, incontestably aligning his work with worldwide Indigenous resurgence.
Miranda has performed as a solo artist and with other ensembles across North America including at the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Liquidation World (Vancouver) and The Regent Theatre (Los Angeles). His compositions have been commissioned by Louis Vuitton, Virgil Abloh and Lori Goldston. His score for “Manzanar, Diverted” was nominated for the Best Music Score by the IDA Documentary Awards in 2022.
Miranda’s photographic practice includes documenting portraits of different youth cultures around the world, primarily the underground punk and skateboarding scenes in Southern California and the Pacific Northwest. His work has been published in Hypebeast Magazine, DUNK and Dazed Magazine. He has also published “Northwest Passage,” a book of photography. He currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.