Now and Then

Synopsis

A college student, along with her peers in Japan, rally to change the country’s hostile immigration laws that have incarcerated asylum-seekers in deadly detention centers. Meanwhile, over a century since the 1923 massacre of Korean people during a massive earthquake in Imperial Japan, young activists today take on the torch to seek justice under a government that continues to deny this history. A filmmaker documenting these young activists on the ground begins to excavate the underlying history of discrimination that connects the massacre of a hundred years ago and the draconian refugee system in Japan. Through the process of listening to voices from the past and present, the landscapes in Tokyo begin to echo the unfinished business of the nation’s reckoning with its colonial history.