For years, filmmaker Robert Nakamura – known as the “godfather of Asian American media” – taught a class at UCLA on ethno-communications. Among his thousands of students across the decades was his son, Tadashi Nakamura.
Taking that class inspired Tadashi to become a filmmaker himself. As his father reached his 80s, Tadashi determined to fulfill a long-held dream, bordering on an imperative, to make a documentary about his pioneering contributions to the arts and American life. The result of his efforts, Third Act, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and has emerged as an Oscar contender.
“I think the power of the film is that he is so vulnerable in front of the camera, and I do think that’s because he knew that he wanted to do anything for me, including being as vulnerable as possible for me to make the best film possible,” Tadashi said as he took part in a panel discussion after a screening of Third Act for Deadline’s For the Love of Docs event series. “He does say later in the film too, if it was anyone else, he wouldn’t be as open, and I really think that’s true.”
Father and son: Bob Nakamura is dabbed by Tadashi Nakamura before an interview for ‘Third Act.’
Center for Asian American Media/Independent Lens
Tadashi added, “I think he would never want to do a film on himself. He didn’t have that big of an ego. He was pretty humble, and I’m always the one that would do the bragging for him.”
There was much to brag about. Robert “Bob” Nakamura had survived incarceration as a boy in the Japanese American internment camp at Manzanar in central-eastern California during World War II. As a young man he overcame entrenched racism to become a successful commercial photographer and then, feeling creatively unsatisfied by that work, embarked on a filmmaking career that would see him document the Japanese American experience in such films as Manzanar (1972), Wataridori: Birds of Passage (1974) and Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980).
Bob Nakamura as a young photographer
Center for Asian American Media/Independent Lens
Bob’s wife, Karen Ishizuka — Tadashi’s mother — collaborated with her husband on many of his films.
“Bob always teased that the only reason he married me was for me to produce his films. I think partly it was true — not really — but we had a really good working relationship,” Ishizuka said during the panel discussion. “As I talked to other couples and other partners in the creative process, they often wondered how we could do that. But somehow it was very natural. He was sort of typically supportive and yet at the same time got his points across. So, for example, I’d have him read a draft [of a script] and I could tell that it wasn’t quite up to speed when he says, ‘Well, you want to eat something?’ … I said, ‘OK, that means that I’ve got to go back to the drafting board.’ … We had our disagreements, of course, but I think as I look back, it was really a very rich relationship both as husband and wife and as sort of creative partners as well.”
Ishizuka saw the film evolve in her son’s hands – from what he originally intended as a “standard biography portrait” to something much deeper: an intergenerational story of a Japanese American family’s attempt to thrive in an America that often treated people of their ethnicity with intense suspicion and prejudice. For Bob, the film meant reflecting on the most painful and formative experience of his life – being confined as a boy in a concentration camp.
“From my perspective, it was really the perfect storm in that it enabled [Bob] to really talk about his past and reveal things that he had never done before — with a goal,” Ishizuka observed. “And it wasn’t just to get things off his chest. For him, it really was tied into … wanting to do this for [Tad] … It really ended up, because [Bob] was such a filmmaker, being very both cathartic for both Tad and Bob, but also with a goal in mind. It wasn’t just ego-centered. He really did want to help make this film be as good as he could possibly have.”
From left: Paulo “Prince” Nakamura, Tadashi Nakamur and Robert Nakamura attend the ‘Third Act’ premiere during the 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Cindy Ord/Getty Images
“There was a point when I realized how special these conversations were. Me being the director and a son, the director part of me would probably ask the hard questions that me as a son would never ask,” Tadashi noted. “I think there was a moment where we both realized this was probably a great opportunity — it might be the last opportunity for us to ask all the questions we ever wanted to ask each other. And also, especially for him, to tell all the things he always wanted to tell his son before it was too late. So, I think once we realized the unique special quality of the process, then we really tried to expand it and including my own anxiety about making the film and both of our struggles with dealing with his. And I think that was the one thing that was very unexpected was my dad revealing the trauma, the mixed emotions that he had about, especially his dad, my jiichan, as well as his ambivalence about Manzanar itself.”
Eurie Chung produced the film along with Tadashi Nakamura. She had taken Bob Nakamura’s class at UCLA as well and credits it with steering her career path into filmmaking.
“Bob was a professor in both film and television and Asian American studies there,” Chung recalled. “Tad was actually my TA because he was TA’ing for Bob at that point. I got to L.A. in 2002, took that class in 2003, and it was basically the reason why I’m sitting here today.”
Chung sees a link today between the Trump administration’s roundup of alleged undocumented people across the country and the experience of Bob Nakamura and thousands of other Japanese Americans who were dispatched to internment camps in the 1940s.
“It’s a pretty clear parallel if you even go now to Manzanar [a U.S. National Historic Site], there are signs … that you can’t speak negatively about the U.S. government,” Chung said. “So it’s not just the direct parallels of people being incarcerated without due process because of the color of their skin. It is also the fact that we are not ‘allowed’ to talk about it. I say ‘allowed’ in quotes, but there’s a push to bury this history, and we can kind of see the impacts of what not talking about it within their own family that deeply impacted Bob growing up. … I think the Asian American experience of understanding that history is so fundamental to why we speak out, why we make movies, why it’s essential to keep telling this story.”
Chung added: “It’s been a very surreal process of releasing this movie and showing this movie in the year 2025 in the second Trump administration. It really underscores a lot of the reasons why the film was made and the importance of examining that history and also understanding the deeply personal impacts that it has, the intergenerational trauma.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
For the Love of Docs continues next Tuesday, November 11, with a screening of Mr. Nobody Against Putin, directed by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin. To register for that event, click here.