Following the issuance of Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, there was a brief window of time when Japanese Americans could “voluntarily” evacuate away from the West Coast. Approximately 5,000 men, women and children avoided incarceration by self-evacuating, but faced their own unique challenges as they attempted to resettle in often remote landscapes and battled poverty, hostility and racial violence. Before They Take Us Away is the first documentary to chronicle this largely unknown chapter in the Japanese American experience.