Film duration: 5min 21sec
From 1942 to 1949, the government of Canada forcibly incarcerated and dispossessed thousands of Canadian citizens of Japanese heritage, relocating them to internment camps, or in the case of the Kobayashi family, a sugar beet work farm in the Canadian Prairies.
After accessing the 119- page custodial file of her great-grandfather in the National Archives of Canada, Alison S.M. Kobayashi discovered details about her family history and their life in Steveston before their internment, that were previously unknown.
File No. 2304 is a chapter of her interdisciplinary work, Electric Neon Clock, which explores the government’s custodial file about her family consisting of court transcripts, inventories and forms that reveal hidden narratives and family history.
“A.S.M. Kobayashi’s elegant and hard-hitting short film File No. 2034 is an example of how going back and simply looking at the past, and an archive, with fresh eyes, can be transformative.” —Nasheed Qamar Faruqi, Sense of Cinema
“In revealing how a family’s history was translated into typed numbers and letters by the state, and filed away in a vast archive, Kobayashi also offers possibilities for its retrieval, its surprisingly vivid details still intact, if you know how to look.” —Genevieve Yue, Cosmic Rays Review
Acknowledgements: UnionDocs, Creative Capital, Canada Council for the Arts, New York Council on the Arts, Yaddo and MacDowell. Special thanks to Landscapes of Injustices Project at the University of Victoria.
On display from July 7, 2025. Admission is Free
Location: Japanese Fishermen’s Benevolent Society Building at Steveston Museum and Post Office, 3811 Moncton Street, Richmond BC
