Snow Falling on Cedars (1999)

Snow Falling on Cedars
excellent story involving atrocities suffered by the Japanese at the hands of ignorance and the us govt.
scenery is spactacular!

layers upon layers of ghosts
The movie is about ghosts.
First, the ghost of the dead fisherman and the trial of the Japanese-American accused of his murder.
Second, the ghost of a long ago childhood forbidden love affair between the small town newspaper editor/publisher's son and the now-wife of the accused.
Third, the ghost of Pearl Harbour, WWII and the racial prejudice that resulted in the concentration camps for Japanese Americans.

The three ghosts are completely twisted together, the newspaper editor can't move on from his childhood love, the community can not rise above the racial profiling it engages it.
It's a depressing, period piece, sad with the quiet street full of Japanese-Americans, now war hysteria internees walking down the small town's mail street to be ferried to Manzanar for the duration of WWII. The movie is at least 75% flashbacks, it is very non-linear, very literary, not your usual movie fare. There are two heroes, the defense lawyer and the small town publisher, but they are completely overwhelmed by the masses of people demanding that something be done. But the story is not about them, it is about the two main characters, moving on and letting go of their old ghosts.

This movie, like movies such as Farewell to Manzanar, are necessary to dispose of our society's old ghosts. Showing them in the light of what happened, and hopefully why it happened, in order that it won't happen again. Ghosts don't seem to die if you just ignore them, bury them away and try to forget. Just as he has to forget his childhood love, understand that she is married and has a life of her own without him, the island people have to come to grips with the fact that they transported their friends and neighbors to camps in the hysteria of the moment. Every WWII movie i see, i ask the question of "how could the good Germans not know, not fight the evil around them?". This movie partly answers that question with the answer of "it happened here and very few spoke up", the scene of their transportation by ferry will be as rememberable as all those scenes of German Jews marched to their death. This scene is the climax of the movie, moving, saddening, and i'm afraid all too true and prone to be repeated each generation, only with different faces and different "reasons".

The music, the cinemagraphy, the plot and literary basis, the acting, all well above average, very well integrated and deeply moving.

A Timeless Film
This is a great movie. It has everything: great scenery and background music, courtroom drama, young love, suspense, and human interest. I view it over and over again, learning something more each time about human frailties and prejudices. It is vastly superior to the trash being produced these days that relies on sex, violence, special effects and ear shattering sound without a plot and very little acting.