Emiko Omori
Emiko Omori (born 1940) is an American cinematographer and film director known for her documentary films. Her feature-length documentary Rabbit in the Moon won the Best Documentary Cinematography Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival and an Emmy Award after it was broadcast on PBS that same year. One of the first camerawomen to work in news documentaries, Omori began her career at KQED in San Francisco in 1968. Life and career The youngest of three sisters, Omori was born in California to parents of Japanese descent. In 1942, the family was uprooted from their small but prosperous vegetable farm in Oceanside, California and taken to the Poston internment camp in Arizona where Americans of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated after the attack on Pearl Harbor and signing of Executive Order 9066. The family was released in 1945, shortly before her fifth birthday and returned to Oceanside. Her mother died a year later. Omori later said of her childhood and young adult years: I totally rejected everything Japanese and didn't want to have anything to do with it. Of course, the internment camps didn't help. The Japanese language was violently and adamantly suppressed, and we were 'discouraged from congregating'. So, for