Kiyoshi Project Location Shoot at the 2024 Heart Mountain Pilgrimage
by Rob Buscher
8/23/24
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, Kiyoshi was a Sansei (third-generation Japanese American) activist born in the Heart Mountain WY concentration camp during World War II. Kiyoshi was raised in Monrovia CA and spent most of his adult life in Philadelphia after moving here at age 18 to attend University of Pennsylvania’s architecture program. He was a tireless human rights advocate throughout his life who demonstrated with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., co-founded the Gay Liberation Front–Philadelphia, and was a leading activist across many other causes including anti-war, civil rights, HIV/AIDS treatment, internet freedom, and medical marijuana. Kiyoshi's uncle was Yosh Kuromiya, one of the 63 conscientious objectors tried for draft evasion as a member of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee. 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 during Spring semesters.
This film 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 and is available to stream online at Out-FM’s website. Aside from hosting Kuromiya’s papers in their archive, William Way Executive Director Chris Bartlett was mentored by Kiyoshi when he was a young activist, making their partnership in this project meaningful on a personal level. Other collaborators include Kiyoshi’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 Kiyoshi 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 activist community, in an effort to better understand the ethnic component of Kiyoshi’s intersectional identity. Glenn and I had known each other for close to a decade, as I previously presented his 2014 film The Barefoot Artist about Lily Yeh, founder of the Philadelphia arts organization Village of Arts & Humanities, at the Kimmel Center 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 Kiyoshi’s surviving friends and colleagues. The interviews were conducted in a replica of Kuromiya’s Philadelphia apartment and other important locations from his life that were reconstructed in a sound stage at the Hill Theatre Studio in in Paulsboro NJ. These will be interspersed with archival footage and several key interviews that Kiyoshi 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 American concentration camps where Japanese Americans were held during WWII, 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 the thirteen-episode podcast series Look Towards The Mountain, about daily life inside the camp.
Attending the 2024 Heart Mountain Pilgrimage that recently took place July 25-28, this was my fourth visit to the site. Kiyoshi 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 Kiyoshi’s return to Heart Mountain signals a pivotal moment in his life. Kiyoshi passed away in 2000 due to medical complications related to AIDS so we do not have the benefit of his perspective on what the pilgrimage meant to him.
Our main objective was to shoot this year’s pilgrimage through the eyes of Kiyoshi's younger brother Larry. 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 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 with the audience, 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 Kiyoshi 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 Kiyoshi, 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 pilgrimage. I look forward to sharing more updates about the project as it continues, and eventually hope to host a campus screening at Penn.
For more information about the Kiyoshi Project visit: https://www.pewcenterarts.org/grant/kiyoshi-project