Synopsis | "Landscapes of Home" examines the lives of two doctors in the mid-20th century: Henry Shibata, a Japanese Canadian born in Vancouver, and Stuart Cooper Robinson, a Canadian born in Nagoya, Japan. Their worlds are upended by WWII, with Shibata facing internment in the Rockies, while Robinson is pushed from his lifelong home in Japan amidst growing intolerance. Charting their transformative journeys, the documentary captures their resilience and the indelible marks left by displacement. Through their stories, it reflects on the Japanese Canadian struggle from a new perspective and redefines what it means to find home against a backdrop of war and loss. 

Programmer's note | The film begins with the question of whether home is only the place where a person was born. It looks at how war and displacement shake a life, and how the feeling of home still takes root within that upheaval. Even when people are forced from the land where they have lived for years, they build a place for their lives again within themselves. It is from that very place that the film asks what home really means. While a single loss can alter the entire way a person understands the world, the time of exile leaves marks on that perspective that do not fade. Even so, the landscape of home returns with sharper outlines over time, and memory grows into a stronger force that helps a life hold itself together again on new ground. The film does not leave home behind as a place belonging only to the past. Home is a red dot on a map, but it also exists as a form of time that remains in the heart and appears in the language of one’s life. The paths of two lives swept in different directions and brought elsewhere reveal the depth of how a person carries home within them. The film traces the way one builds, in the midst of loss, an inner landscape where roots can take hold again and life can bloom. In the end, the film understands that home is the shape of a life that the searching heart has held onto and kept alive over time.