After interviews with 50 former camp residents, IKON director Wil van Neerven selected 17 of them for the film “Sudah, never mind!”.The Ikon broadcast its “oral history” of the Japanese internment camps in two parts in 1986. The title Sudah, never mind! was taken from the reaction of a large number of candidate interviewees: “Sudah”, spoke mainly representatives of the older generation, “just let that terrible period rest”.
Wil van Neerven paints both a complete and chronological picture of the 225 internment camps, where some 100,000 people were interned in total.
Van Neerven’s main motive for emphatically not basing the subject on historical data, but sketching it purely on the basis of personal, emotional and perhaps subjective testimonies, is, for the first time, to bring years of hidden suffering properly into the open.