"A.S.M. Kobayashi also attends carefully to the object in File No. 2304, named for the government record kept on the filmmaker’s great-grandfather, who had, with other Japanese-Canadian citizens, been involuntarily interned during the Second World War. Kobayashi briskly scans through microfilm that itemizes objects seized from the household: toys, a dining table, a stuffed pheasant. “The Kobayashis were robbed by bureaucrats,” she reflects. “Their dispossession was neatly organized in memorandums, diagrams, forms, reports, and charts.” From within the cold rationalization of racist persecution, the filmmaker reconstructs something of a family history. She looks to recognizable ear shapes in photographs, a child’s harmonica that might have been the same as one that belonged to her aunt, and matches them to their present day manifestation: the site of the family home, now a parking lot, and her smiling aunt with a harmonica pressed to her lips. In revealing how a family’s history was translated into typed numbers and letters by the state, and filed away in a vast archive, Kobayashi also offers possibilities for its retrieval, its surprisingly vivid details still intact, if you know how to look."
—Genevieve Yue