Delta sisters’ documentary to air on PBS station today

“The Ito Sisters,” the story of one Japanese family’s journey to be accepted as Americans, which was screened in the Tillie Lewis Theatre in February for the Day of Remembrance, will reach out to a wider audience on Wednesday.

The 2017 film will air on the Sacramento PBS station KVIE, Channel 6, at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

“The Ito Sisters” began as a family project for Antonio Grace Glenn, an actress, director, producer and filmmaker. She traveled to Southern California to visit her grandmother, Lillian, and her great aunts, Nancy and Hedy, to record a birthday wish for her mom, Evelyn Nakano Glenn.

“I kept the camera running and they started sharing stories I hadn’t heard before,” Antonia Glenn told The Record in February.

They told stories of growing up, and Glenn wanted to hear more. She took the three sisters back to their hometown of Courtland, on the Sacramento Delta, which stirred even more memories, Glenn said.

Glenn, a scholar, began digging into Japanese-American history and the result was a greater understanding of the anti-Japanese sentiment that existed in the first half of the 20th century.

“There were laws and measures to limit the rights of Japanese immigrants and their American-born citizens from not allowing them to become citizens or own land,” Glenn said. “All of this struck me as very familiar in terms of the rhetoric today. There are so many parallels between the anti-immigrant sentiments against the Japanese and today against Latinos and refugee populations from Muslim-majority countries.

“The film stands as its own history and in parallel to what we’re going through today. What started as a small family story became a bigger snapshot of a time and place in our history.”