In Japanese, meaning “golden repair,” Kintsukuroi refers to the traditional art of mending broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum—and it’s also the perfect metaphor for Kerwin Berk’s sweeping historical epic. Set in the 1940s, the film follows a Japanese American family fractured by U.S. wartime politics, and against all odds, it truly shines. Despite an extremely limited budget, writer-director Berk has crafted a compelling, two-plus-hour historical drama on Japanese American internment with a level of intimacy and emotional truth rarely achieved—and certainly not with this kind of personal urgency. Even with my usual resistance to historical epics, I was completely glued to the screen from the first frame to the last. Kintsukuroi doesn’t just tell history—it repairs it, filling its fractures with empathy, humanity, and quiet gold.

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