(2003) TRT: 18 Min.
YELLOW BROTHERHOOD is a short personal documentary about a friendship and finding community through a self-help group turned basketball team that began in the 1960s.
Filmmaker Tad Nakamura met Brett and Khi-Min when they were six years old on a community basketball team called the ‘Venice YB’. As Tad says in the film, ‘We didn’t know what YB stood for and we really didn’t care – all we cared about was having fun.’ As they grew, they learned that YB stood for ‘Yellow Brotherhood’, a self-help group formed by a gang called ‘The Ministers’ to help youth get off drugs. Only later did they realize how the tradition of Yellow Brotherhood’s dedication to personal and political development helped them through their own problems and empowered them to carry on its legacy of creating and serving community. Features never-before-seen stills and footage of Los Angeles’ Japanese American community in the 1960s and 1970s.
