Join us at the Museum for a screening of Third Act (2025) and discussion with filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura and other esteemed panelists.

Generations of artists call Robert A. Nakamura “the godfather of Asian American media,” but his son and the director of the Japanese American National Museum ’s Frank H. Watase Media Arts Center, Tadashi “Tad” Nakamura, calls him Dad. As Parkinson’s disease clouds Robert’s memory, Tad sets out to retrieve his story—and in the process discovers his own.

Using the lessons Robert taught him, Tad deciphers the legacy of an aging man who was just a child when he survived America’s concentration camps, a successful photographer who gave it up to tell his own story, an activist at the dawn of a social movement—and a father whose struggles won his son freedoms that eluded Japanese Americans of his generation. Throughout the years they have made films together, with Robert always by Tad’s side. Third Act is most likely their last.

$10; free for CHM members.

Schedule

2:00 p.m. – Film screening begins
3:30 p.m. – Panel discussion begins
4:00 p.m. – Event concludes

Questions? Contact Nell McKeown, development events manager, at mckeown@chicagohistory.org or (312) 799-2112.