What are the experiences that shape the long lives of those we live among? In The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors, my ninety-two year old neighbor Joseph Fischer recounts the experience of being on of the first US Navy seamen sent into Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two weeks after the atom bombs were dropped. His intimate testimony and examination of the photographs he took there are paired here with two films exploring two other catastrophic events of World War Two–the internment of Japanese Americans and the death march of prisoners out of Auschwitz. In each film, witnesses struggle to articulate these shattering experiences that were central to their lives. Using interviews, photographs, and archival film, the films explore the process of bringing into the present, fragmented and enigmatic memories of personal and collective traumas as they continue to reverberate across generations.

With:

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige by Rea Tajiri, 1991 & The March by Abraham Ravett, 1999