Sophie and the Rising Sun

The autumn of 1941, a small town in the American South. Grover Ohta, a Japanese American found injured by the roadside, recovers in the house of a kind woman named Ann and stays on in the town. His neighbour Sophie lives alone and makes her living catching crabs. The two draw close over painting and a garden. Then the news from Pearl Harbor arrives and the town turns into somewhere else entirely. Maggie Greenwald wrote and directed it from Augusta Trobaugh's novel, and it screened at Sundance. The telling hears the war from a distance; the real subject is how the neighbours look at one another once that news lands. The rounding up of Japanese Americans and their removal to camps sits at the centre of the story. Julianne Nicholson plays Sophie and Takashi Yamaguchi plays Grover, with Margo Martindale and Lorraine Toussaint in the cast.