Aleut Story

This poignant, richly textured film contains compelling interviews with Aleut internment survivors, many of whom are speaking out for the first time in more than 60 years.

Credit: APT

The incredible, untold story of Aleut Americans' decades-long struggle for human and civil rights.

Aleut Story, airing Saturday, November 17, 2012 at 10 p.m. on WXXI World (cable 524/DT21.2)., was developed, researched, filmed and edited for national television over five years. Thousands of pages of historical documents, public testimony, congressional debate, personal memoirs, photographs and scholarly texts were reviewed. Filmed entirely on location, the project took the film crew to the Aleutian Islands, the Pribilof Islands, the historic sites of federal duration camps at Funter Bay and Killisnoo, to Anchorage, Juneau, Seattle and Washington, D.C. But the real strength of this film is the chorus of first person voices.

Aleut Story presents a living history, told by Aleut American evacuees and internment survivors themselves. It is their stories, their voices, that resonate across time and distance. Their unflinching accounts lending an inexpressible eloquence to the film.