With two provocative tales of race and injustice in California shot from different perspectives, one from behind barbed wire and another from a migrant workers' camp, two professors in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media are making waves with hard-hitting documentaries that were recently screened at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.

Director Robert Nakamura, in "Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray," tells the fascinating life story of the photographer who first brought to light images of life at the Manzanar WWII internment camp in Owens Valley, Calif. When Miyatake was framing shots of camp life with a makeshift camera he made from scrap wood and a lens he smuggled in, Nakamura, then a boy of 5, was an internee at the same camp.

In another story of injustice in the Golden State, "Rancho California (por favor)," directed by John Caldwell, reveals "California's dirty little secret," where indigenous Mixteco workers are housed in wooden boxes only yards from posh residential neighborhoods in Carlsbad, Del Mar, San Marcos, Coto de Caza, Escondido and La Costa. "That such a system flourishes in the NAFTA era of globalization and affluence is both hard to grasp and also somehow logical," Caldwell said.

The much-praised documentaries will be screened for the campus community April 8 at 7:30 p.m. at the James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall. Caldwell and Nakamura will be available to answer questions and will attend a reception following the free screening.

Critic Shannon Kelly, writing in Film Guide, praised Caldwell's documentary as "an extraordinary feat of artistic and political fusion" that "explores a charged American debate on the meaning and consequence of immigrant culture."

The film depicts the artistry and expression of migrants who live in near-slave conditions. Caldwell, a former seasonal farm worker in the Midwest, noted that those "who worked the land there still had some claim to it." In contrast, he said, "the agriculture in California simply strips the system of this human sense of ownership, leaving laborers cut off in a complex world of subcontractors and middlemen, which guarantees that workers never live in one place for very long."

Nakamura's film has been described as "an elegant documentary" by the Sundance Film Festival and, by a Los Angeles Times reviewer, as "eloquent and deeply moving ... a penetrating portrait of this immigrant photographer's search for truth and beauty in a world of impermanence."

Before the war, Miyatake was already an accomplished pictorial photographer. Once he was discovered at Manzanar, he was allowed to photograph freely, creating some of the most famous images of this shameful period of American history. The film presents Miyatake's pictorial and modernist photographs for the first time since they were exhibited in the 1920s and '30s, as well as many of his never-before-seen photographs of Manzanar.

As Miyatake, who died in 1979, was the first to capture Manzanar in still photographs, Nakamura became the first to capture the camp experience on film with his groundbreaking 1974 documentary, "Manzanar."

Nakamura holds the Endowed Chair in Japanese American Studies and also is the associate director of the Asian American Studies Center. He is also artistic director of the Media Arts Center of the Japanese American National Museum.