CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION is the award-winning film that has provoked controversy nationwide for its recovery of the untold story of the largest organized resistance to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, and the suppression of that resistance by Japanese American leaders.

Through home movies, government film and interviews, it tells the story of the Fair Play Committee, 85 young Japanese Americans who in 1944 refused to be drafted out of the concentration camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, until their rights were first restored and their families released from camp. It was the largest organized resistance to incarceration, leading to the largest trial for draft resistance in U.S. history.

The government prosecuted them as criminals; the Japanese American Citizens League ostracized them as traitors. The dissidents served two years in prison, and for the next 50 were written out of the popular history of Japanese America. Through their eyes we see into the heart of the Japanese American conscience and a public debate that is still alive today -- on July 1, 2000, the national Japanese American Citizens League voted to apologize to the Heart Mountain resisters, a move condemned by many old-time JACL'ers.

The film was recently voted Best Feature by the audience at its world premiere at VC FilmFest 2000, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific American Film & Video Festival.