FILM CREDITS

Director

Karina Ezitis resides in California. Raised in Hawaii in an Asian and white family, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue work in the film industry.  She married and moved away from Hollywood. When COVID struck, she was presented with the opportunity to film for the local theater’s YouTube Channel to maintain their audience retention during the Shut-down period.  Since then she has become a three time successive winner for the regional mini-documentary showcase “The Big Tell” which airs on Valley PBS.  In early 2025, she received a nomination for the WAVE Public Television award for her mini-documentary, “Ballico Taiko.”  Row Don’t Drift: An American Legacy is her debut feature film as director.

Producer & Writer

Craig Colvin is a CLIO, Cannes Lions & ADDY award-winning casting director who’s cast, produced and consulted on 2500+ Film, TV and Live Event projects over the past three decades. Possessing the ability to adapt and perform a wide range of tasks across the entire production process, he consistently strives to increase productivity and efficiency. He embraces his free time by diving into screenwriting.  His gregarious nature and enduring love of traveling across the globe have given him experience in a diversity of cultures and lifestyles, which keeps his work real and relatable. Amongst his myriad of interests, his lifelong passion for vintage cars and the connections he’s forged in the gearhead community proved invaluable with Row Don’t Drift.  It would be remiss not to mention his lifelong rock-solid loyalty to the Miami Dolphins and University of Miami Hurricanes through all their highs and lows.

Producer

Amanda Erlanson is an Emmy Award-winning writer/producer based in Los Angeles who has guided hundreds of documentary and commercial productions from concept through completion. An ingrained passion for research led her to writing about artists and filmmaking, and from there to crafting grant proposals to fund documentary film projects such as this one. 25 years working as a supervising producer have made her adept at anticipating production roadblocks and a calm troubleshooter of complications whenever they arise.

Writer

Isaac Rowland, a Venezuela native and world traveler, has been blessed with exposure to a wide variety of cultures and ways of thinking. Now based out of Montana, he applies the communication and observational skills developed during those experiences to writing and filmmaking. He devotes himself to telling stories that matter in projects including his documentaries Our Backyard, One Wild Family and Wolves on the Margin.

Director of Photography

Jason Wada is an independent media producer from Fresno, California, who heroically stepped up from second unit director of photography to lead cinematographer when that became necessary during the course of filming. After earning a BA in electronic media production from Cal State Fresno, he has amassed over 15 years of experience in multimedia production, bringing a broad skill set, progressive technical background, and creative digital wizardry to all his endeavors.

Editor

Wesley Campbell is a game designer, film editor and visual effects artist from Modesto, California. He began making movies in high school, then earned his BA in cinema and media arts at Biola University, and is currently in the Professional Unity Developer Program at GameDevHQ.

Costume Designer

Heather Harrison is a period wardrobe expert from Merced, California, who swooped in and saved the day when the original costume designer contracted for the film dropped out at the last minute. In addition to designing costumes for a multitude of theatrical productions, she also serves as the Costume Librarian at Playhouse Merced, providing an invaluable resource to artists working throughout the region.

Yoshi Kubo

Jason Ha is an actor, swordsman, martial artist, stuntman, gamer and sometime bartender. Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, where he began honing his acting skills in theater, he now calls Los Angeles home while working on film and television projects all over the world.

Hilmar Blaine

Ian S. Peterson began performing at the age of seven after picking up card magic, juggling, and unicycling. Growing up in the Bay Area, he appeared in over 50 theater productions as a youth, where he found himself drawn to improv and sketch comedy. In the past five years, he’s appeared in hundreds of film and television projects, while earning his BFA in acting at CalArts. When not performing or working as a cinematographer, Ian is a US Coast Guard Captain and enjoys directing short films, sailing, singing, piano, graphic design, and riding his unicycle.

Shizuma ‘Shiz’ Kubo

Joe Akira is a first-generation Japanese American actor, filmmaker and photojournalist who lives in Santa Monica, California. After growing up as a rebellious skate rat in the South Bay, he earned a BA from UCLA in political science focusing on conflict resolution in the Middle East with a minor in film and television entrepreneurship, while simultaneously serving as a staff photographer for the Daily Bruin. More recently, he wrote, produced and directed a narrative short about the post-WWII Japanese American experience, Tales of Spring: Sandi’s Story.

Historian

Cherstin M. Lyon is author of the book Prisons and Patriots: Japanese American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory, and is considered one of the foremost scholars on the Nisei draft resisters of conscience. Originally from Oregon, she received her BA and MA in history at the University of Oregon, and her PhD in history at the University of Arizona, where she was instrumental in collecting and preserving the oral histories and personal records of The Tucsonians, which she wrote about in her doctoral thesis entitled Prisons and Patriots: The Tucsonian Draft Resisters of Conscience Of World War II. Prior to moving back to Oregon, she was a professor of history at California State University, San Bernardino for 13 years, where she was honored with CSUSB’s outstanding professor and outstanding faculty mentor awards. Currently she is Director of the Honors College at Southern Oregon University. Her expertise is in Asian American history, immigration and citizenship law, and public and oral history. 

Poet & Essayist

Lawson Fusao Inada was born in Fresno, and like Yoshi Kubo, interned at Camp Amache, which he wrote about in his 1992 volume of poetry and prose Legends from Camp, winner of the American Book Award. An ardent jazz aficionado and jazz bass player, he studied poetry at Fresno State University and went on to teach English at Southern Oregon University for several decades. Instrumental in the 1979 rediscovery and republication of John Okada’s seminal 1957 novel about a Japanese American draft resister's return to society, No-No Boy, he is also the author and editor of numerous works about the Japanese American internment and the Nisei draft resisters of conscience, including Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience. He also served as the narrator of the PBS documentary films Children of the Camps (1999), about the legacy of trauma the internment inflicted on its child prisoners, and Conscience and the Constitution (2000), about the 63 young men from the Heart Mountain camp who resisted the draft order. In 2004, he was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, and subsequently served as the fifth Poet Laureate of Oregon from 2006 to 2010.

Congressman

Mike Honda was born in Walnut Grove, California, and like Yoshi Kubo, interned at Camp Amache, an experience that inspired his life of service in education and local, state and federal government. As a member of Congress from 2000 to 2017, representing San Jose, he is also a witness who can speak to the influence that Senator Daniel K. Inouye and Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta exerted upon Congress and President Bush in the wake of 9/11 in explicating the injustice of the internment—testimonials that helped temper our government’s response to our Muslim American population. With deep conviction that perpetuating the memory of the internment can help prevent similar actions in future, he is still fighting for recognition and preservation of the confinement sites, and has been instrumental in many successful efforts, including the creation of the memorial at the site of the Merced Assembly Center, featured in this film, and the long-sought designation of Camp Amache as a National Historic Site in 2022. He is currently working in partnership with Congressman Mike Thompson (CA-4) toward the repeal of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was used to authorize the internment and is even today being leveraged to justify similar unconstitutional actions against immigrants. 

Civil Rights Attorney

Dale Minami was born in Los Angeles in 1946, shortly after his family was released from the Rohwer concentration camp. While studying political science at USC as the civil rights movement unfolded, he became invested in his own community’s stake in that fight. Shortly after graduating from Berkeley Law in 1971, he co-founded the Asian Law Caucus, the first non-profit offering free law services to Asian Americans. In 1981, a discovery made in the National Archives revealed that government lawyers had intentionally suppressed and altered evidence in the wartime Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States. When Fred Korematsu refused to obey the government order to relocate, he argued that it violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” In 1944, the Supreme Court rejected Korematsu’s argument, stating that “martial necessity arising from the danger of espionage and sabotage” asserted by the prosecution was sufficient justification for the evacuation order. Yet the government had misled the court, concealing a 1942 Naval Intelligence report that stated there was no evidence of espionage or sabotage by Japanese Americans. In 1983, Minami headed the legal team that vacated that Supreme Court decision, exonerating Fred Korematsu and compelling a public statement by the court condemning the racist exclusion order.