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They Chose China / Wendy…Uh…What’s Her Name

5 April Wednesay, 8:15pm

The truth and its consequences. The decisions under duress one is forced to make sometimes derive from a system of belief, a personal code that embraces an ideal. In times of war and even in peace, this process is exaggerated through propaganda, words meant to sway opinions as well as allegiances. In these two documentaries, watch how young men after the Korean War and a young idealistic woman bent on revolutionary change choose a course of action based on political
conviction that sacrifices a way of life betraying as it were their American Dream in protest of the societal status quo intent upon perpetuating the U. S. industrial military complex.

They Chose China
Shui-Bo Wang | 2005 | 52 min | video | CAN
It is January 1954. The Korean War is over. Captured UN soldiers held in POW camps are free to return home. Those who refuse repatriation to their homeland are transferred to a neutral zone and given 90 days to reconsider their decision. Among them are 21 American soldiers who decide defiantly to stay in China. They Chose China tells the story of these forgotten American dissidents
as we begin to understand this group of men who fought for and then cut ties with the USA.

Wendy...Uh...What’s Her Name
Curtis Choy | 1976, 2005 | 27 min | video | USA
Narrated by Tamlyn Tomita
On February 4, 1974, the notorious Symbionese Liberation
Army kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. A month later, SLA members and Hearst robbed a bank in San Francisco. After the telecast shootout with police in Los Angeles, two remaining SLA members and Hearst fled to rural Pennsylvania. There they met Wendy Yoshimura
who was eluding authorities who had indicted her on weapons and explosives charges in 1972. After 3 years on the run, Wendy was captured with Hearst in a San Francisco apartment, where the FBI threatened to “blow Wendy’s head off.” She was kept in isolation for 40 days, then jailed for 3 months until the Wendy Yoshimura Fair Trial Committee came to her aid.
Thirty years later and updated with a new interview footage,
this is the true story of Wendy Yoshimura, Japanese American woman artist, her life in the revolutionary 70s and the community that rallied behind her against injustice.

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