Behind-the-Scenes on the Kiyoshi Project Documentary Film
A version of this article originally appeared in Pacific Citizen.
Over the past year and a half, I have been working with a Philadelphia-based film production team to co-produce a feature-length documentary biopic on the late HIV/AIDS activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya. The film is being developed in partnership with William Way LGBT Center, with major funding support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. As a mixed-race Japanese American who works across academia, film/television production, and social justice advocacy – this has been one of my most rewarding professional experiences to-date.
For those unfamiliar, Kuromiya was a Sansei activist born in the Heart Mountain concentration camp during World War II. After the war Kuromiya returned with his family to Monrovia, CA where he grew up before moving to Philadelphia at age 18 to attend University of Pennsylvania’s architecture program. He would go on to spend most of his adult life in Philadelphia, devoting his time to numerous activist causes including civil rights, anti- war, and Gay rights movements. Among the many highlights of his activist career Kuromiya demonstrated alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., co-founded the Gay Liberation Front–Philadelphia, organized significant campus protests at UPenn to stop the war in Vietnam, and successfully led a class action suit against the federal government that resulted in the Supreme Court overturning the Communications Decency Act – safeguarding freedom of speech on the internet.
Activism ran in the Kuromiya family, as Kiyoshi's uncle Yosh Kuromiya (1923-2018) was one of the 63 conscientious objectors tried for draft evasion as a member of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee. Yosh Kuromiya’s contributions are perhaps best remembered through his memoir “Beyond the Betrayal,” published posthumously in 2022 – the only memoir to-date by a Nisei draft resister. As such, the Kuromiya family have long been a research interest of mine, and their stories are featured in the course I teach on Asian American Activism at UPenn. Yet for someone so accomplished, the record of Kuromiya’s life on film is surprisingly sparse.
Kuromiya’s biographer Che Gossett (who is involved in our project) produced a 12-minute short film in 2014 titled Kiyoshi Kuromiya: A Queer of Color and AIDS Activist Inspiration, which outlines his activist career. California-based filmmaker Robert Shoji has previously directed two short films about the Kuromiya family. A Hero’s Hero (2020) originally planned as a short biopic on Yosh Kuromiya, when he named Kiyoshi as his own personal activist hero in a key interview, the 11-minute film evolved into an exploration of the younger Kuromiya’s activism. Shoji followed this up with his 8-minute short film The Fourth March (2022), that told the story of Kuromiya’s involvement in the Selma-Montgomery marches, which led to his friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Envisioned as a 90-minute feature-length documentary, our film will build upon the important work that both Gossett and Shoji have done in introducing Kuromiya’s story in the film medium, by sharing for the first time an expansive and comprehensive overview of his entire life’s story. The Kiyoshi Project (working title), grew out of a collaboration between director Glenn Holsten (Wyeth, The Barefoot Artist) and producer Keith Brand, who serves as Chair of the Radio Television & Film Department at Rowan University. In 2021 Brand produced an audio documentary titled Kiyoshi Kuromiya: The Wonderful, Fabulous Life of a Civil Rights Zelig, that first aired on WPPM Philadelphia radio and is available to stream online at Out-FM’s website.
Brand approached Philadelphia’s William Way LGBT Center to serve as the film’s institutional partner, in part because they house Kuromiya’s papers within their archives. Kuromiya worked closely with William Way since its founding in 1975, and bequeathed his extensive collection of research related to HIV/AIDS and lifetime of activism to the center when he passed away in 2000 from complications of AIDS. Longtime William Way Executive Director Chris Bartlett was mentored by Kiyoshi when he was a young gay activist, making the center’s partnership in this project deeply meaningful on a personal level.
Other collaborators include Kuromiya’s biographer Che Gossett, who serves as Associate Director at Penn’s Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and Teresa Jaynes – an artist, curator, and longtime community organizer who conducted one of the final interviews with Kuromiya towards the end of his life.
I became involved in the project when Glenn Holsten reached out to me for advice on how to best connect with the Japanese American community. Glenn and I had known each other for close to a decade, as I previously presented his 2014 film The Barefoot Artist when I served as Festival Director of the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival. When the Pew Center awarded the production a major grant in September 2023, I joined the project as co-producer, focusing my efforts on community engagement with many of the groups with whom Kuromiya worked, including queer, Black, and Asian American activists as well as Philadelphia-area community media producers and Japanese Americans.
This summer we completed about 90% of the principal photography, shooting a dozen or so interviews with Kuromiya’s surviving friends and colleagues. The interviews were conducted in a replica of Kuromiya’s Philadelphia apartment and other significant locations from his life that were reconstructed in a sound stage at the Hill Theatre Studio in Paulsboro NJ. These will be interspersed with archival news footage and several key interviews that Kuromiya gave during his last decade of life, allowing the story to be told mainly in his own voice. I had the privilege of sitting for an interview, but the highlight of my engagement with this production to-date was our location shoot at the Heart Mountain Pilgrimage in Wyoming.
While my research encompasses all of the former WWII confinement sites, I have studied Heart Mountain in greater depth than any other due to my collaboration with the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation to produce and host their thirteen-episode podcast series Look Towards the Mountain, about daily life inside the camp.
Attending the 2024 Heart Mountain Pilgrimage that took place July 25-28, this was my fourth visit to the site. Kuromiya was born at Heart Mountain in 1943 and returned with his mother in 1984 at one of the first organized pilgrimages, around the same time he started his last stage of activism during the AIDS crisis. This was likely around the same time that he contracted HIV, so in many ways Kuromiya’s return to Heart Mountain signals a pivotal moment in his life.
Our main objective was to shoot this year’s pilgrimage through the eyes of Kiyoshi's younger brother Larry Kuromiya. Born in the postwar era nine years younger than Kiyoshi, Larry is the last surviving member from his family of origin. Since this was Larry’s first visit to Heart Mountain, I had the honor of giving him and his wife Ann a personal tour of the site, which was captured on film. The next day we had the incredible opportunity to record a seated interview with Larry inside an original residential barrack from WWII inside a 20x20 foot apartment that was designed to house five people. During their incarceration ordeal the Kuromiya family had seven people living in a space that size, which added to the emotional weight of Larry’s filmed remarks in this space that so closely resembled the conditions his family endured there.
We also shot pick up interviews with two incarceration survivors Kiyo Fukumoto and Sam Mihara – who were incarcerated at ages 2 and 9, respectively. Both are stalwart supporters of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation and have devoted a considerable portion of their lives to sharing the Japanese American incarceration history with public audiences. Their interviews will help us share specific details of the wartime incarceration story, providing additional historic context for this segment of the film. Actress Tamlyn Tomita (Karate Kid II, Picture Bride) also sat for an interview, whose great-great-grandmother died in the same hospital complex where Kuromiya was born.
We are planning another day or two of shooting at William Way archives, to capture Kiyoshi's extensive collection of papers and photographs. We anticipate starting post-production by the end of this year with a current timeline of late Summer 2025 for a rough cut / picture lock. Planned to coincide with the end of the Pew grant timeline in Fall 2025 is the Kiyoshi Day symposium at William Way, where we will invite members of the respective movements that Kiyoshi was affiliated with for a sneak preview screening of the film. Following that we will engage the attendees in a conversation about how we can better support each of our movements, as a tribute to Kuromiya, as we know that he would be there doing this work if he were alive today.
Thank you to Larry and Ann Kuromiya for their willingness to participate in this film, which is immensely better for their contributions during the Heart Mountain Pilgrimage. Thank you also to the staff and board of Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, whose support during an already busy time made our location shoot possible. I look forward to sharing more updates about the project as it continues, and once the film is completed, bringing Kiyoshi Kuromiya’s story to audiences around the country.
For more information about the Kiyoshi Project visit: https://www.pewcenterarts.org/grant/kiyoshi-project