Last June, Kobe Planet Film Archive organised a special programme dedicated to the works of filmmaker Takahashi Ichirō and producer-director Ukumori Noritae, two key figures in the development of independent film culture in the Kansai region over the past fifty years. Both passed away in 2021, and many of their works were donated to the Kobe Planet Film Archive. The memorial event focused on the films produced by Eiga seisaku iinkai, a film production committee formed by a group of citizens in 1985, and those made by 8 no kai, a collective formed in 1970 by a diverse group of people, amateur filmmakers and industry professionals, who set up an office in Sakuranomiya, Osaka. Both Takahashi and Ukumori were two important members of these groups.
Both Takahashi and Ukumori were two important members of these groups. As far as I could tell from the few films I was able to see and the leaflet I was given, 8 no kai and Eiga seisaku iinkai – the latter of which seems to be still still active – mainly produced films dealing with environmental and social issues, with a strong focus on grassroots activism in Kansai and the surrounding areas.
The first film I saw was 原発はいま Genpatsu wa ima (Nuclear Power Now), directed in 1982 by Ōmi Michihiro and scripted by Takahashi. The movie exposes not only the myth of the nuclear power’s safety, shattered by the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, and the release of radioactivity, at first denied and covered up, at the Tsuruga Nuclear Plant in 1981, but more importantly represents an exposure of how labor work in the nuclear facilities was, and still is, exploited. The film, produced by 8 no kai, covers the struggles and protests of workers at a couple of nuclear power plants, active at the time of filming, in areas such as Mihama, Ōi and Takahama in Fukui Prefecture—the area with the highest concentration of nuclear reactors in the world, producing energy mainly for Kansai and its urban sprawl— Kubokawa in Kochi Prefecture, and Onagawa in Miyagi Prefecture. Examining the reality of the subcontracted workers and their horrific working conditions, the documentary could be paired, in an ideal double bill, with Morisaki Azuma’s 生きてるうちが花なのよ 死んだらそれまでよ党宣言 Nuclear Gypsies (1985), an incredible piece of fiction revolving, among other things, around the life of nuclear gypsies, or with the less known documentary いま原子力発電は Nuclear Power Plants Now directed by Haneda Sumiko in 1976.
My second film was 生命ある限り As long as there is life (1988), a work directed by Takahashi and produced by 8 no kai, about the tragedy of the atomic bombing and the hope for peace, as told by people gathered annually at the meeting of the Hyogo Prefectural Council of Atomic Bomb Survivors. The movie is made of a collection of testimonies and interviews of the people living in Hyogo, people who were affected directly or indirectly by the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The last movie at the screening event for me was 風ものがたり 食と農と環境 The Wind Story: Food, Farming and the Environment (1995), directed by Takahashi, produced by Ukumori Noritate, and backed by Eiga seisaku iinkai. This is the final film in an environmental-themed trilogy directed by Takahashi between the mid-eighties and the mid-nineties, started with 24000年の方舟 24000 Years of the Ark in 1986, continued in 1991 with 奇妙な出来事アトピー The Strange Event of Atopy, and completed with The Wind Story. The movie is narrated by famous actor Yūsuke Kawazu, who passed away last February and who has been a very popular face in films and TV in the last sixty years, and features and focuses on three similar environmental experiences. A young couple of full-time farmers living and working in Ikeda, a small mountain village in Fukui prefecture, a joint group of producers and consumers in Takefu, again a city in Fukui, and a group of consumers and activists living in Osaka. All these people share a sensibility towards a life lived with a strong awareness of the interconnection existing between the humans and the elements around them, such as soil, water, mountains, plants, other animals, and so on. The common thread running throughout the short documentary, it is less than an hour long, is the relationship between the soil and the food grown on it and consumed by the inhabitants, a philosophy encapsulated in the motto, often seen and heard in the documentary, “Soil is Life”. Filmed with an interesting visual flair and with a joyful, and sometime loud, soundtrack that almost recalls the folk singers of the 1970s, the most interesting part of the documentary was for me the one about the family in Ikeda. By cultivating rice in a narrow space of land between two mountains and adapting to the physical conditions of the territory, it reminded me of Satoyama, an important concept in Japanese culture, famously and overtly present in two works of Studio Ghibli, Totoro (1988) and Only Yesterday (1991), but also in other documentaries made in the archipelago.
Discovering these two groups was a refreshing experience for me, one that intensified my interest in filmmaking conceptualized and done on a local level, in connection with the territory. A type of documentary that often flies under the radar, because it embodies a different idea of filmmaking and documentary, not always lavish, spectacular, and without high production values. At the same time I don’t think it can be called pure video activism, there is a political message at its core of course, but at least in the three films I’ve seen, there’s also a special care towards creating a story, an alternative narrative, to capture the viewers and make them part of a community. I don’t know for sure how these documentaries were screened in the 1980s or 1990s, probably in city halls, community centers, other kind of public or private spaces, or even in few selected mini-theaters, but it’s fascinating, and this is my opinion and personal reading of it, how this exhibition through alternative venues, while minor in scale and numbers, gave them an enhanced resonance and different type of reception. The relationship between documentary filmmaking and its exhibition practices, in the past, but also nowadays, in Japan, but also in the rest of Asia, is a very interesting topic worth a research and an in-depth analysis.
Asian Docs 