Film "Amache Rose" brings dark Colorado history into the light
Denver Film Festival is highlighting several movies focused on Colorado, including one that centers on a plant that's revealing the history of a people. In a green house at the Denver Botanic Gardens, a mystery is unfolding.
"We still haven't gotten them to bloom here on site," said Billy Kanaly, producer with Denver Botanic Films.
These roses were found on the site of the Amache Internment Camp in southeastern Colorado.
"The rose doesn't actually exist naturally in that environment, so we know they have to been planted by the Japanese-American people during World War II," Kanaly explained.
Kanaly made a film about the discovery of the roses, and its significance.
"This is a very important piece of history because it's one of those things that for so long we just swept it under the run and ignored it," Kanaly told CBS News Colorado.
The internment camp is gone now, but the roses are a window into how internees lived there. They took this high desert landscape and turned it into something more recognizable to them, planting trees and gardens. It was one of the many ways they dealt with being incarcerated.
The roses have survived 80 years with care or attention. Now horticulturalists at the Botanic Gardens are propagating the plants.
"Our goal in the project is to get them to a size where they'll start to bloom, and we can figure out a little more of what kind of rose, and unravel a little more of the mystery, " said Mike Bone, a horticulturalist at the Denver Botanic Gardens as part of the film.
The project is further unravelling the mystery of what life was like to be in-prisoned in America because of your ethnicity.
"It's very important that we talk about these things so it never happens again," Kanaly said.
The Amache roses are living testament to a dark time, just like the film "Amache Rose" documents their journey into the light.
LINK: Information & Tickets for Denver Film Festival
The Denver Film Festival runs through Sunday, November 13, 2022. "Amache Rose" will play at the Denver Botanic Gardens after the Festival is over.
