David Suzuki, Canada’s venerable environmentalist, is passionately pursuing a surprising new venture. He is acting in a movie called TORA, a film about Japanese internment camps in B.C. during World War II. The 75-year-old signed up for his first acting role ever when filmmakers Wendy Ord and Glen Samuel approached him with their script.
The story follows a woman who inherits a lakeside property in BC’s interior and eventually discovers it was a Japanese Internment camp during WWII. Suzuki plays a guilt-ridden, grieving father still hoping to find out what happened to his 9-year-old daughter who disappeared from the camp in 1942. “Suzuki had always been our first choice for the role and he himself had been interned as a small boy,” Ord says. “So he had a connection to the story.”
During the war Canada interned over 22,000 people of Japanese descent, three-quarters of them Canadian Citizens, “just because we looked like the enemy” as Suzuki’s character says in the film. “It’s one of the darkest chapters in our history,” says Samuel. “There’s a scene or two that may cause some controversy but to David’s credit he didn’t back away.”
A year and a half in the making, the 30-minute film’s a feast for the eyes with stunning scenery and gorgeous cinematography. Produced by Mountain Lake Films and co-starring Kate Bateman, Kevan Ohtsji and Krista Shepard, TORA will simultaneously make its Canadian, Australian and US Festival premieres the first week in March with its world premiere at Women In Film Festival in Vancouver. View the trailer here:http://www.torathemovie.com/web/Trailer.html.
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