New documentary shines mild on Frank Matsura and his portraits of Indigenous life in Washington

Vancouver filmmaker Beth Harrington remembers visiting the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma 25 years in the past to see an exhibition of principally stoic-looking portraits of Native Americans taken by Edward Curtis.

She was struck, nevertheless, by a handful of playful, humorous portraits shot by one in all Curtis’ contemporaries.

“The images were so powerful to me — they showed a relationship between the person in front of the camera and the person behind the camera,” she stated. “Very palpable connection going on and, in many cases, a relaxed attitude from the people who were posing.”

That encounter launched Harrington to Frank Sakae Matsura, a Japanese American photographer who documented Indigenous individuals in Okanogan County, Washington, in the course of the early twentieth century. It despatched her down what she calls a “rabbit hole” of analysis that finally grew to become her new documentary about his life.

The 90-minute “Our Mr. Matsura” will display Sunday at Vancouver’s Kiggins Theatre. The occasion accompanies a traveling exhibition of Matsura’s images, on show on the Japanese American Museum of Oregon in Portland from Sept. 27 by means of Feb. 8, 2026.

Washington State University artwork professor Michael Holloman — a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, which shares geography with Okanogan County — co-curates the exhibition, pairing period-specific regalia with Matsura’s images. Holloman seems within the documentary alongside descendants of Colville members and white settlers who visited Matsura’s studio within the city of Okanogan.

Holloman says Matsura’s portraiture stands out for its authenticity and self-directed model, avoiding the frequent apply on the time of portraying Indigenous individuals as a vanishing race.

“He’s not trying to ensure that he’s capturing something from an ethnographic perspective,” he stated. “Local tribal people (who) came into his studio … (were) deciding how they wanted to look, so you can tell that engagement with Frank was not a paternalistic, hierarchical engagement.”

According to the documentary, Matsura was born in 1873 to a samurai household that had dominated in southwestern Japan earlier than the Meiji Restoration dissolved feudalism.

With few written data obtainable, Harrington and her researchers in Japan discovered Matsura’s early diaries and photographs from his family, and linked with individuals on the Christian ladies’ college and close by church in Tokyo the place he taught and attended.

They discovered that in 1901, the 28-year-old Matsura boarded a steamship from Yokohama to Seattle with out telling his household and buddies, turning into a part of the primary wave of Japanese immigrants to the U.S.

His writings by no means defined why he left Japan or when he realized images. But Harrington says his Christian upbringing and sharp mind helped him to adapt to American life.

“(In Japan) people were learning about Christianity in conjunction with learning English (and) using the Bible means speaking English,” she stated. “He (spoke) English very well … he also stayed up late every night studying — sometimes it was astronomy, sometimes it was philosophy, and sometimes it was English.”

“That translated into how he adapted.”

Harrington provides that Matsura tailored so effectively he even realized to talk Chinuk Wawa — a pidgin of Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Canadian French and English used amongst tribes and fur merchants — together with his Indigenous shoppers.

Holloman says Matsura’s images helped bridge racial and gender divides: “He’s presenting these different groups in ways that they might not themselves interact, and that’s remarkable.”

Matsura died of tuberculosis in 1913 at age 40. The documentary recounts newspaper stories describing his funeral as the biggest of its variety in Okanogan County, with 300 individuals in attendance. He was buried in Okanogan in keeping with his household’s needs.

His legacy endures, as Harrington noticed throughout screenings of her documentary in Omak, Washington, in April.

“Six hundred people saw the film in two days, and at the Q&A session, several people got up … and said, ‘Look at us all sitting here in the same room.’ One of them was (Colville tribal elder) Randy Lewis, who was in the film. He said, ‘Frank has done it again.’

“People there still felt this connection to him a century later.”

Matsura got here to the U.S. throughout a time of rampant discrimination in opposition to Asian immigrants and different populations of coloration. Harrington hopes her documentary may help break boundaries between individuals, simply as Matsura did in his lifetime.

“I’ve been trying to emulate Frank,” she stated. “I do hope people might just pause for a second and think about how we can be kinder within our own communities.”

Listen to Beth Harrington’s interview with OPB “Weekend Edition” host Lillian Karabaic:

Editor’s word: Beth Harrington was a contract producer with OPB from 1996 to 2020.