Stourwater Pictures

Documentary about the life of Sidney Rittenberg, an American who spent over 30 years in China and was an active participant in the Chinese communist revolution.

Fumiko Hayashida: The Woman Behind the Symbol is both a historical portrait of Fumiko, her family and the Bainbridge Island Japanese American community in the decades before World War II as well as a contemporary story which follows 97-year old Fumi and her daughter Natalie as they return to the site of the former Minidoka internment camp, their first trip back together in 63 years. The film reveals how the iconic photograph became the impetus for Fumiko to publicly lobby against the injustices of the past.

The daughter of a Nebraska minister, Anna Louise Strong earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Chicago. But it was in the Pacific Northwest, where she witnessed the 1916 Everett massacre and chronicled the 1919 Seattle General Strike, that her political vision took shape. In Moscow she helped found the first English language newspaper, in Spain her many visits resulted in her book, Spain in Arms; and in China she interviewed Mao in a Yan'an cave in 1946. She is buried in Beijing in a special cemetery for martyrs of the revolution.

Roy Hiroshi Matsumoto was an American soldier of World War II. A Nisei, Matsumoto was born in Laguna, California. When he was 8 years old, his parents sent him to live with his grandparents in Hiroshima, Japan. He returned to California nine years later, attending and graduating from Long Beach Polytechnic High School in 1933. He remained in Long Beach when his parents took his brothers and sisters back to Hiroshima. Matsumoto was interned with other Japanese-Americans in the Jerome, Arkansas concentration camp at the beginning of the Second World War. In 1942, he volunteered for the United States Army. He served as a Japanese-language intelligence specialist with Merrill's Marauders in the Burma Campaign during World War II, earning a Bronze Star and the Legion of Merit. Matsumoto remained in the Army for 20 years, retiring after a career in military intelligence as a master sergeant in 1963. At the time of his death he lived with his wife on San Juan Island, Washington.