National Film Board of Canada

An interactive pilgrimage through an emotional geography of immigration and family to recover what was lost.

In 1935, Yonezo Okita left his home in Hiroshima, Japan, and began a new life in Canada. Then war and state-sanctioned racism changed everything—he became the enemy. Three generations later, his grandson, artist Randall Okita, leads us on an interactive virtual pilgrimage through an emotional geography of immigration and family to recover what was lost.

MATRIARCHS AND BUFFALO PULL NO PUNCHES, YET LEAD US WITH CARE

Draw Me Close blurs the worlds of live performance, virtual reality and animation to create a vivid memoir about the relationship between a mother and her son charting twenty-five years of love, learning and loss . Weaving theatrical storytelling with new forms of technology, the individual immersive experience allows the audience member to take the part of the protagonist, Jordan, inside a live, animated world.