You grow up with the idea that World War II -- with the occupation and the postwar environment -- is part of your genetic inheritance. One of the things I encountered in Japan was people thinking I was the daughter of a prostitute and a GI. There’s all this history you carry around with yourself, even though you didn’t experience it firsthand

Raised in New Haven, Conn., by an American father and a Japanese mother, both of whom taught at Yale, Lounsbury grew up with a feeling of vague estrangement -- of being aware of her mother’s "Japaneseness" and of knowing, as she says in the film, that "wherever I go, I'm always different." Instead of examining that genetic split, however, and looking at how it had shaped her, Lounsbury followed a path that divided her from her family and roots. At 14 she went to boarding school and from then saw her parents only on holidays. College followed, plus eight years in Japan and a film career that kept her constantly moving. After all that time, Lounsbury said during a conversation in San Francisco, "I was disturbed at how my mother and I had gotten out of touch. So I thought, since I’m such a workaholic and the only thing I pay attention to is what I’m working on, the best thing I could do is make my mother the center of my work . . . give her a chance to see what it is that I do."