An award-winning documentary explores the generational traumas of Japanese-American families.

80 Years Later is more than a documentary; it’s an example of an honest, multigenerational discussion almost every family could benefit from.

It’s not the first time that academic and filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu has drawn inspiration from her family. She has six other movies under her belt, starting with 1993’s Mahal Means Love and Expensive based on interviews with young Filipina women on race, colonialism, sex and love.

“I married into a Japanese-American family,” Parreñas Shimizu says about her newest project. “I got to know my father-in-law [Tadashi Robert Shimizu, the main character of the movie] as this warm, hilarious man.” Later on, she learned the story her husband’s family wasn’t talking much about.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and Executive Order 9066, which imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, hence the title of the movie. Many of the families imprisoned were from the Bay Area, where Japanese-Americans of San Francisco had built a sophisticated middle-class community. Many others were from Salinas and Monterey.

The Shimizu family was one of thousands. Tadashi Shimizu’s father was sent to an FBI camp in North Dakota, while he, his mother and brother were sent to a “regular” camp in Arizona. He was so young that he remembers only a few random images, he confesses in the movie, among them stealing and eating a fresh cucumber.

After they were released and reconnected, the family moved to Cincinnati. “Even when the family thought they left the past behind them,” Parreñas Shimizu says, “we were reminded of it soon enough.”

The documentary premiered in May at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and won Best Historical Documentary at the Toronto Documentary Film Festival this July. It explores the racial inheritance of Japanese-American families through multigenerational conversations with survivors and their descendants.

A local screening will benefit Asian Cultural Experience, a nonprofit organization that works to preserve the history and multicultural identity of Salinas’ Chinatown neighborhood.

80 YEARS LATER screens at 6pm Thursday, Sept. 15. Cinemark Monterey, 1700 Del Monte Center, Monterey. $20 (in advance only), tickets at bit.ly/80yrsscreening. 373-8051, salinasace.org.