DEL MAR -- There are fishing tales spun of golden bygone times and those that tell a harsher truth.

The World War II-era story of Japanese-Americans who were held in internment camps and crawled under wire fences to fish is being told now by documentary filmmaker Cory Shiozaki.

Barred from leaving the infamous Manzanar camp near the Eastern Sierras in California, many inmates found ways to escape to fish for rainbow, brown and elusive golden trout, Shiozaki said Wednesday.

"It was an expression of freedom behind the risks they took," he said. "It was better than being locked up behind barbed wire, even if for a few moments."

"For some people it was a form of resistance, but mostly it was that yearning to be free at whatever cost," added the filmmaker, an avid fisherman and the son of internment camp survivors.

An exhibit on Shiozaki's film, "From Barbed Wire to Barbed Hooks," is on display this week at the annual Fred Hall Fishing Tackle and Boat Show, which runs through Sunday at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.

His exhibit is plastered with collections of old photographs, maps and weathered reels and lures. A DVD based on his documentary-in-the-making features interviews with survivors who intersperse stories of forced confinement with tales of brief escapes to fish the nearby waters.

Mamoru Shishido, 82, of Oceanside, a survivor of Manzanar, visited the exhibit Wednesday. He said he decided to come to the annual fishing show after hearing Shiozaki's display would be there..

Shiozaki, surprised, was eager to hear his stories, too.

"At first it was terrible," Shishido said about Manzanar, as he examined each photograph and map in Shiozaki's collection. Born and raised in Burbank, Shishido was taken by bus with his parents and four siblings in 1942 to the camp and was not allowed to leave until 1945.

More than 110,000 Japanese-American people were placed in 10 U.S. camps -- then called relocation facilities -- during World War II. Manzanar, the first of the camps to open, held more than 10,000 people. It wasn't until 1988 that Congress approved legislation apologizing for the internments.

For Shishido, bare wood slats covered the ground where he and others slept at Manzanar.

"When you woke up, everybody was covered with dust," he said.

Shishido said he and the other Japanese-Americans detained without charges were paid $16 a month for work they did at the camp.

"Manzanar was like a real prison camp," he recalled. "At other camps you could get passes. You couldn't get them here. There was nothing you could do."

Their brief escapes

So, like dozens of others at the camp, Shishido said, he joined friends he met and escaped for brief periods to go fishing.

"We just made it through the wires. They didn't follow us at first," he said about his first successful trips -- once to a spot eight miles from the camp.

"Then came the jeeps," he said, describing how he was arrested and jailed for a few days. Later, he added, he continued to slip through the wires to fish.

Like many other young Japanese-American men interned at the camps, Shishido was immediately drafted for military service upon his release.

He said he has returned several times in recent years to Manzanar, which was declared a National Historical Site in 2004. The sole remaining building, a gymnasium, was converted to an interpretive center, where filmmaker Shiozaki is a docent.

Shishido said he never talked to his children about what happened at the camp.

The omission does not surprise Shiozaki.

"My parents never told me about it. It came to me as a shock," said Shiozaki, who learned about the internment camps in school. Then he learned that, before his parents met and wed, his mother had been at an internment camp in Utah and his father at a camp in Idaho.

"I was more outraged than they were," he recalled. "They said, 'Oh, that happened a long time ago.' As a third-generation Japanese-American myself, I'm still trying to figure out why they didn't tell their children."

Later, Shiozaki joined the film industry, working on movies such as "Dances With Wolves," "Training Day" and "Back to the Future." He also became a licensed Eastern Sierra trout-fishing guide.

"These trout are very special. It's a tremendous ecosystem," he said. "I was going up there at least 10 times a year."

Noticing that large numbers of Japanese-American families were traveling each year to the creeks of the Eastern Sierra to fish for trout, he began asking for and collecting stories of the internment camps.

With his work now near completion with help from a nonprofit grant, Shiozaki hopes to find new funding and complete work on his documentary later this year.

His parents approve of his work retelling the fishing stories of Manzanar, he said.

"They're proud that I'm able to bring it out," Shiozaki said.

For more about Shiozaki's project, visit www.fearnotrout.com.