An aspiring Portland filmmaker and descendant of Japanese-Americans interned at camps during World War II hopes to produce a documentary that includes southern Idaho’s Minidoka Internment National Monument.

Kevin Walker is visiting 10 former camp sites, 17 assembly centers and other locations related to the United States’ decision in early 1942 to round up more than 120-thousand American citizens of Japanese descent on the West Coast and force them to live behind barbed wire.

Idaho’s Minidoka site was originally a 33,000-acre prison compound operated by the War Relocation Authority at the Jerome County farming community of Hunt. It operated from 1942 through 1945 and at one time held as many as 9,400 U.S. citizens of Japanese descent.

In May, President Bush signed a bill to expand and refurbish the monument, as well as add an 8-acre site on Bainbridge Island, west of Seattle, as a satellite to the monument. The Bainbridge site is where 227 men, women and children were rounded up and placed aboard a ferry in March 1942 to be sent to Minidoka.

Walker hopes his film about the monument will be completed in 2009. (AP)