It’s amazing how much a person can learn by watching 91 minutes of documentary short subjects. Six of the best short docs were played back to back at one sitting at the Village East Cinema Friday afternoon as the Tribeca Film Festival was starting to wrap things up. I’ll talk about the two prize winners here and, in a later post, I will discuss some of the others.

Do you know who Michi Nishiura Weglyn is? I didn’t until I saw Out of Infamy, directed by Nancy Kapitanhoff and Sharon Yamato. The film won a “Special Jury Mention” at the festival. Ms. Weglyn spent an impressionable part of her youth during World War II in the Gila River, Arizona, detention center for Japanese Americans. Her story is especially interesting because she later became a successful fashion designer, probably best known for doing the costumes for The Perry Como Show on network TV during the 1960s.

Weglyn took advantage of her small bit of fame to do years of research on the concentration camps and to write a definitive history called Years of Infamy, a book that exposed this shameful episode of America’s recent past. Weglyn should be known as a hero to all Americans for her struggle to reveal an unpopular truth.

I spoke with co-director Sharon Yamato at some length on several occasions. She is an elegant, soft-spoken woman from Southern California and is the only member of her parents’ family who was not interned in a concentration camp during World War II. Two of her sisters were born in the camps. She herself avoided confinement by being born after the war was over. We talked about the fact that many Americans are not aware that these camps even existed. Many say, “There have never been concentration camps here in the United States.” Well, there have been, and over 110,000 American citizens of Japanese descent were herded there like animals and placed behind barbed wire. These people lost their homes and businesses, and FDR didn’t care. Especially now, when historical revisionism seems to be popular with some school districts, this is not an issue that should be shoved under a rug. The more Americans who see this movie and learn about what happened to fellow Americans who didn’t look like the typical WASP family, the better it will be for all of us.

The recipient this year of the prize for Best Documentary Short is White Lines & The Fever: The Death of DJ Junebug, a very interesting examination of the birth of Hip Hop music in the South Bronx circa 1983. I didn’t know about DJ Junebug. But I learned that he was a much loved young man whose life took a fatal wrong turn when he started selling drugs along with spinning records. No one knows who killed him, but he and a girlfriend were brutally beaten to death in a Bronx apartment, probably by drug-dealing cohorts. Several of the people interviewed who knew Junebug personally broke down in tears on camera when speaking about his demise.

The film is also about the seminal Hip Hop club, Disco Fever. This is where Grandmaster Flash impressed the crowds with the way he could handle a turntable. But everybody in the film said DJ Junebug was the best at what he did. One man said that, had Junebug lived, he would have won Grammy after Grammy. Junebug wasn’t even thirty when he died.

The director of White Lines, Travis Senger, who looks to be in his twenties, was at the Q&A after the screening. When someone asked him why he made the movie, he said that he grew up with Hip Hop and wanted to learn more about it. He did a fantastic job. He really got the people he interviewed to open up. They were sincere, passionate, funny, and likable. Mr. Senger hopes to make a longer film about the musical phenomenon called Hip Hop sometime in the near future. It should be something to see.