Script File

Internment

Inspired by my father’s family's experiences in the Internment Camps during the Second World War, INTERNMENT explores the lives of a fractured Japanese American family forcibly reunited by the internment of all Japanese Americans during World War II.

  • Phinneas Kiyomura
    Writer
    Twisted (Freeform), Lydia in Bed (Play), Figure 8 - Seven Deadly Sins Plays, Phrazzled (play), Supper (play)
  • Project Type:
    Television Script
  • Number of Pages:
    58
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • First-time Screenwriter:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • ABC Disney Writers Program
    Los Angeles, CA
    January 1, 2013
    accepted into program
  • HIT LIST - for feature LAMBS
    Los Angeles, CA
    January 1, 2012
    Listed Feature
  • FIND Screenwriters LAB
    Los Angeles, CA
    February 27, 2006
    accepted into lab
  • KLASKY CSUPO Writing Contest
    Los Angeles, CA
    2001
    2nd place, best script
Writer Biography - Phinneas Kiyomura

Phinneas Kiyomura is a playwright, screenwriter, actor, former skate punk, and dad from Long Beach, CA.

His critically acclaimed plays (Lydia in Bed, Figure 8, Woods, PHRAZZLED) have been produced at Theatre of NOTE, Padua Playwrights and Sacred Fools, among others.

He is a FIND Screenwriters Lab Fellow (for his feature BEDS AND GRAVES), an ABC Disney Writers Lab Fellow, winner of the KLASKY CSUPO writing competition, and was a staff writer on TWISTED (Freeform). He has developed projects for New Regency, Mark Gordon Co., and ABC Studios.

He is currently in development on several projects, including: RING OF FIRE, a journey through faith and madness, and PYRAMIDS, an exploration of revolution in the face of eternal mystery. He appears as an actor in upcoming features KILL, ME DEADLY and AFTER WE LEAVE. His graphic novel, 442, is now available on the Stēla app for iPhone and Android.

Variety has called him an “impressively original voice”. His brother has called him “a total fucking dick”. If you’re in the market for a brutal farce about billionaires who cannibalize each other, or a morality play where the only moral character is the town’s unrepentant drug dealer, then Phinny’s your man.

He and his wife, Andrea, have a tame cat and a wild daughter.

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Writer Statement

INTERNMENT is my passion project. It is inspired by my father’s family’s, and so many other Japanese American Families’, experiences during the second world war. It’s an amalgam of these personal stories and the classically American family dramas written by Eugene O’Neill (the Tyrone family) and Arthur Miller (the Loman family). I firmly believe that if Miller or O’Neill were alive today they would be working in television/episodic storytelling. These are vast tragic families whose lives echo the rise and fall of American culture, that wrestle with the problems of the day, but, even more so, the eternal problems that fire our existence: how do we love, how do overcome hate, and how do we live honestly despite the need to live among others, to live in a “society”.

I believe that in Internment we can tackle those very same themes in the crucible of a much-ignored page of history. Normally, a writer has to devise reasons to keep characters colliding against one another in a static location — a hospital, a police station, Santa Barbara. With Internment, the crucible of an Internment Camp (a prison) not only exists, but grows hotter as the war effort challenges our characters to choose between assimilation and extradition, between compliance and defiance, between self-abnegation and self-destruction. Drama is built on choices, hard choices, and in the camps they were manifold.