Filmmaker Statement

As a Japanese American, my perspective is neither one culture nor the other but rather a tangled hybrid. The search for identity is rooted in who I am. There is beauty in having a diverse heritage, but the flip side of spending time in one place is that it requires not being in the other. Without the renewal of lived experiences, memory can outlive and even overtake reality. "Places We Knew" was created to question the power of memory versus lived experience when forming identity. The film attempts to stir the difficult feeling of loss to a once familiar place.