Featuring Jimmy Mirikitani. Unrated. Plays Friday to Friday, December 15 to 22, at the Vancity Theatre

Artist Jimmy Mirikitani has an eye for cats, drawing them from memory over and over again for pennies from strangers, but his recollection of other things is even stronger. Eighty at the time this incisive documentary commenced shooting in 2001, he was living on the streets of New York City, mostly under the awning of a Korean corner store.

When Manhattan is blanketed by toxic dust on September 11, young filmmaker Linda Hattendorf—a veteran film editor and here a first-time director—takes him into her SoHo apartment, and they begin to unravel the story behind the eccentric behaviour of a self-described “grand master artist”.

It turns out that Jimmy (real name Tsutomu) was born in Sacramento, California, to parents who soon took him to Japan. With war clouds forming, they then brought the teenager, already a promising artist, back to the States. This was a bad move, because he ended up in an internment camp, with his American passport seized.

His cat fixation, we learn, came from a younger lad who followed Jimmy around the camp, asking him to draw felines. The boy, like too many, died in the desert, and Mirikitani seems haunted by that spectre, his genial surface giving way to rage whenever the past or anything involving the U.S. government comes up. His temper is further provoked by the increasingly xenophobic climate in Bush’s America, with “foreigners” singled out for fresh but all-too-familiar abuse.

Remarkably, as Hattendorf helps her new friend, they discover things about, and from, his past that turn out to be considerably more agreeable than expected. The tale, abetted by poignant yet unsentimental music and sharp editing, packs a surprisingly big wallop at the end. This is an interventionist documentary in all the best ways.