Konrad Aderer

Konrad Aderer is a filmmaker and Emmy Award-winning editor whose work focuses on stories of immigrant resistance to exclusion and incarceration. The roots of this passion lie in his family and personal history. A fourth-generation Japanese American, Konrad lived alternately on both coasts until settling in New York. Konrad fell in love with acting in fourth grade, performing in local theaters wherever he lived. Launching his professional career in adulthood, he performed the classics in regional theatre and Off Broadway, and principal roles in films including the Independent Spirit Award-nominated Ignatz & Lotte (1995). Finding opportunities for Asian American actors limited, Konrad began exploring the other side of the camera. He crewed on film and TV productions, and with the support of his Asian American community and mentors including Sam Pollard and John J. Valadez, began his evolution into a filmmaker. The repressive aftermath of 9/11 and the mass arrests of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian immigrants in his city compelled Konrad to switch from narrative to documentary. For his short Rising Up: The Alams (2005)he followed a Bangladeshi-American family struggling with their father's imminent deportation. Konrad's first feature, Enemy Alien (2011), intertwines his own family history of World War II incarceration with the fight to free a Palestinian activist from immigrant detention. By a twist of fate in August 2005, Konrad found himself in his father's Gulf Coast house with his brothers in the direct path of Hurricane Katrina, an experience he documented in his first personal work, A Corner of Her Eye (2005). His documentary Resistance at Tule Lake (2017), which told the long-suppressed story of incarcerated Japanese Americans who refused to submit to an infamous "loyalty questionnaire," reached national audiences on PBS from 2017 to 2020. In 2022, Konrad garnered a NY Emmy as editor of a magazine piece on the the Jewish commandos of World War II who inspired the film Inglourious Basterds. Konrad has since begun working on docu-fictions exploring the lives and literature of transnational 20th century Japanese Americans: the Kibei and Issei.