Product Details

• Actors: Fred Korematsu, Rosa Parks, Bill Clinton
• Directors: Eric Paul Fournier
• Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo)
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Docurama
• DVD Release Date: March 27, 2007
• Run Time: 70 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000KJU1IC
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #33,407 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Of Civil Wrongs and Rights - The Fred Korematsu Story" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

In 1942, Fred Korematsu was an average 23-year-old California native working as a shipyard welder. But when he refused to obey Executive Order 9006, which sent 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry into internment camps, he became something extraordinary--a civil rights champion. Award-winning director Eric Paul Fournier follows Korematsu’s story from the moment he first resisted confinement to the hard-won victory he finally achieved 39 years later, with the help of a new generation of Japanese-American activists seeking vindication and the assurance that such a terrible injustice would never occur again.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An absorbing and timely documentary film, October 4, 2009

By 

NCTejana (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Of Civil Wrongs and Rights - The Fred Korematsu Story (DVD)

This film is one of the most powerful I've ever seen aired on PBS, and I've watched innumerable documentaries there over the last 10 years. As noted by an earlier reviewer, the case is examined in close detail and the presentation contains many insights into the ins and outs of how it initially came to be handled the way it was: the biases within the Asian-American and non-Asian-American communities, Korematsu's own reasons for opposing the internment (along with the obvious civil rights interests, he had personal reasons as a young man involved in a romance that would be interrupted), and the lies that were told by the U.S. government even over the objections of its own legal advisors.

Even more thought-provoking and interesting is the examination of how a new generation of lawyers and law students rose up to challenge the original decision many decades later. Their relentless pursuit of a way to get the faults of the case addressed in a new legal precedent is an amazing story in which Korematsu himself once again played a key role.

I first saw this film not long after the events of 9/11 and the reactionary, emotional climate of restrictive law-making and ethnicity-based harassment that ensued in the United States. The closing portion of the film discusses the continuing relevance both of Mr. Korematsu and of his legal case in 21st-century America. The results both disturbed and inspired me, and I cannot recommend it more highly.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Anatomy of a Case, December 19, 2007

By 

Jeffery Mingo (Homewood, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Of Civil Wrongs and Rights - The Fred Korematsu Story (DVD)

Too many people think the Supreme Court is perfect. It's not! Look at "Plessy v. Ferguson" or "Bowers v. Hardwick"! They screw up and the "Korematsu" decision from the 1940s is part of that. This documentary takes an extensive look at that case.

This work breaks down dichotomies and pushes aside simple explanations. We learn that the national ACLU did not want the Northern California branch to take this case. The work said Japanese Americans shunned Korematsu because they thought he didn't want to be associated with them. Later the work tries to figure out how relatively liberal Justices could err so terribly.

This work has diverse interviewees: Japanese and whites; men and women; older people and younger ones. I gasped when seeing the dude who taught a constitutional law class I took. I didn't care to see that conceited, self-absorbed man on my screen. They show a photo that Korematsu took with Hirabayashi; it reminded me of the photo of King and X together. Actually, Korematsu really reminds me of Rosa Parks in many ways.

Korematsu tried to get his eyelids changed. I know many younger women try to get rid of epicanthic folds now, but I didn't know a man could do it back then. Many viewers may benefit from watching this alongside the documentary "Going for Broke."