Activist legend Nobuko Miyamoto came to Boston for the ArtsEmerson screening of the documentary about her – “Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement” – and the timing could not have been more appropriate.

Amid the anniversary of Executive Order 9066 – which led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II – and just before immigration authorities began coming after pro-Palestinian protesters, Nobuko Miyamoto graced the stage and enraptured the audience by performing a set of four of her protest songs and sharing some of her story and choreography with the sold out crowd at the Bright Family Screening Room inside the Paramount Center on Feb. 22.

“We were thinking about what films and other things we could do to recognize the anniversary of the Executive Order 9066 … as a way of making sure these things don’t happen again,” Susan Chinsen, the founding director of Boston Asian American Film Festival, told the Sampan recently. Chinsen, who is also an ArtsEmerson Creative Producer, said the screening and appearance made sense “in these times.” She added that finding a way to stay strong and use art as activism was also important, as Miyamoto does.
“We were just really fortunate. We were like, ‘Oh, could we just ask if maybe she might be available to come?’ We were extremely surprised and ecstatic that she was available and was able to join us.”

The Boston Asian American Film Festival is co-presented by the Asian American Resource Workshop and ArtsEmerson, as well as in collaboration with the Asian Community Fund. The festival featured “Nobuko Miyamoto: A Song in Movement” last year and it won the Audience Choice Award.

“You have this legend in front of you,” Chinsen said of Miyamoto. “One of sort of the first in terms of the Asian American art and activist movement. … The scope and the breadth of the types of messages and who she collaborated with and worked with from Lakota Indigenous communities to both her work — I mean, it sort of exemplified her work with the Black Power Movement and also singing in Spanish and it felt very much like, ‘Yeah, we’re a part of a community. This struggle that some of us feel like we may be going through right now as a challenge is not new, and that it’s been happening for, you know, a long time now, and this is just why we have to continue to unify.’”

The PBS Art Bound documentary was co-directed by Tadashi Nakamura and Quyên Nguyen-Le and features rare archival footage. It presents interviews with Miyamoto as well as people in Miyamoto’s life such as Dan Kwong, associate director of Great Leap; Buddhist Reverend Masao Kodani; Quetzal Flores, a musician and organizer; and Arlan Huang, an artist and activist.

The film starts with footage of Miyamoto and Chris Iijima performing on a late-night show in the 1970s and being introduced by John Lennon, who introduces them as “Chris and Joanna.” Miyamoto starts by saying, “Usually people know very little about Asians, this is a song about our movement, about our people’s plight in America” before launching into a performance of “We Are the Children.”
With poignant lyrics such as “We are the children of the migrant worker. We are the offspring of the concentration camp, sons and daughters of the railroad builder, who leave their stamp on America” it is a powerful song that plays throughout the documentary.

During the documentary, activist Kathy Mosoaka describes Miyamoto “an activist in her own right. She’s expressing the activism and values through her art.”

Miyamoto is shown sifting through a box of memorabilia that includes a record of “We Are the Children.” She begins reminiscing about the process of making the recording and explains that her mother collected these materials. Miyamoto reminisced about being called “Jo Jo” as a child and how her mom would make her costumes. She told of putting on her father’s records when she was four and dancing in what she described as a “spectacle.” Miyamoto said, “I felt not alone when I danced.”

Miyamoto spoke of dancing in big Hollywood films as a teen and young woman including “The King and I” and the film version of “West Side Story.” She said, “When you talk about rigor, I was dancing with the best of the best.”

The film then goes back in history to Miyamoto’s childhood, showing pictures of Miyamoto as a small child interspersed with footage of newsreels of signs going up about curfews after the Pearl Harbor attack and footage of the Japanese internment camps. Miyamoto’s family was sent to the Santa Anita Racetrack to an incarceration camp a few months after the Pearl Harbor attack. Miyamoto talked of remembering the “dirtiness and the dustiness and the smell. It was windy and we had to sleep in a horse stall.” The family was held there for several months. Eventually, her family was sent to Montana so her father could harvest sugar beets. “Being uprooted like this was a defining thing for a child.” Miyamoto remembered, “Just feeling rootless, homeless, not having friends that you have grown up with or family that you see all the time. Even though I had no words for it at the time, a child could feel it.”

Miyamoto also spoke of working in Hollywood and on Broadway as a young adult and about the racism that she faced on the production of “Flower Drum Song,” which she dropped out of after a year. From there, Miyamoto was given the opportunity to sing at a nightclub in Seattle. That’s where she first encountered young Vietnam War protesters.

She met a director who was making a film about the Black Panthers and enlisted Miyamoto’s help. “That thrust me into the middle of the Black Panther Party and creating a voice for change for Black Americans.”
Soon, someone invited her to a meeting of Asian Americans for Action where she met Chris Iijima. “That was the beginning of my life in the Asian American movement.”

Miyamoto and Iijima began to write and perform songs together at protests and gatherings. “We sang this song ad it was this moment of light. We saw the power of the music. That we wanted to use that power.” Eventually they got a call from Yoko Ono asking them to perform on the late-night show.

The film follows Miyamoto as she and her band perform at concerts and rallies. It details the time when Miyamoto gave birth to her son, Kamau, “It was a defining moment of who I was to become. His father was killed 10 weeks after he was born.”

She spoke of not having time to grieve because she had an infant to care for.

“It stays with you, and it motivates you too. Because I won’t stop. I won’t stop.”