Category: documentary

Militant (video)cinema, an Italian perspective: Videobase

When I started this website, I thought of it as a space for documentary cinema in Japan, and later opened it up to include non-fiction films from Southeast Asia as well. Today though, I’m taking a bit of a detour to put together some scattered thoughts on the Italian collective Videobase, perhaps as a first step toward a longer, more in-depth essay one day…

“In order for the videos to be watched, videotape recorders had to be plugged into a television set. This enacted an occupation of the television screen that symbolically disrupted the state’s monopoly of the two television channels” Jacopo Galimberti, Images of Class

I came across Videobase while reading about Italian Operaismo and Autonomia, and at the same time while looking for examples of militant video works in 1970s Japan. Surprisingly not that many, even though it was the decade when the portable videotape recorders (Sony Portapak, Akai, etc. ironically almost all made in Japan) gave artists and collectives a new tool to experiment and explore with. 

Videobase was formed in 1971 through the collaboration of Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi—already a duo active in experimental cinema in the past decade —together with Alfredo Leonardi, who likewise emerged from the Italian underground scene. As scholar Christian Uva has pointed out, the collective, while not the first to use videotape recorders, can be considered the first to have used the new technology for militant purposes in a systematic way, grounded in a clear theoretical understanding of the medium. 

For the group, their collective activity was “an electronic extension of that form of interventionist and documentary cinema known as militant cinema” one that kept and intensified the difference with the mainstream output. As they recollect in the 1990s “that very sense of incompleteness and formal roughness created and defined a difference; they were reclaimed, through a widespread spontaneism, as qualities—a dirty, anti-bourgeois style set against a power that produced images—broadly speaking—polished and beautiful.”

A video(cinema) against the grain that aimed to choose a clear part on the barricades “to take sides for us, was a deliberate choice, a way of engaging with reality without distorting it—one defined by social figures that today appear blurred: the proletariat and the subproletariat. There was the risk of bias, but everything was laid out in the open. In contrast to a public television—and later a commercial one—that disguised, and still disguises, itself as impartial.”

I’ve seen some of their works, including those shot on film during the same period, which, in my view, remain in clear continuity with their video output. However, I haven’t been able to track down two of their most significant works from the late 1970s, Porto Marghera, il lavoro contro la vita (Porto Marghera, Work Against Life, 1979) and L’isola dell’isola (The Island’s Island, 1974–77). I’ve seen the second part of the latter, which is often regarded as the most complete embodiment of Videobase’s (video)philosophy, at least in regards to creating a new form of video and “television” that was more participatory and circular. Here, previously shot footage is, so to speak, reframed and presented again to the same participants—not only to elicit discussion and reactions, but also to foster a deeper awareness of the representational apparatus at work within the contemporary mediascape.

Still from L’Isola dell’isola (1974-1977)

As I’ve done in the past, I’ve jotted down a series of scattered thoughts that may eventually coalesce into something more fluid and systematic, once I’ve had the chance to engage with the entirety of Videobase’s output.

La casa è un diritto non un privilegio (Housing is a Right, not a Privilege, 1970) “Our first work together was a 16 mm film about the slum dwellers and evictees of Rome, shot for Unitelefilm. It was a collective film, with group direction and discussion during the editing. Working this way, we had the opportunity to evaluate the work through discussion at all levels, including ideological ones.” (Anna Lajolo, Guido Lombardi, 1974)

Il fitto dei padroni non lo paghiamo più (We’re Not Paying the Owners’ Rent Anymore, 1972) the result of 10 months spent by Videobase’s members in the Magliana neighborhood and its committee is also their second work shot on video. 

& Là il cielo e la terra si univano, là le stagioni si ricongiungevano, là il vento e la pioggia si univano (& There, sky and earth merged, there, seasons rejoined, there, wind and rain united, 1972) stands as a fascinating, radical, and rigorously constructed example of militant cinema. It weaves together interviews with social outsiders—exploited workers, former partisans, ex-prisoners, the disenfranchised—with passages of landscape filmmaking, all bound by a forceful Marxist critique of the city, capital, the state, trade unions, socialism, and the bourgeoisie. In its attention to the heterogeneous subjects it brings on screen, the work also operates as a compelling illustration of Mario Tronti’s concept of class composition, captured here in the very process of its formation.
Formally, the film is built largely around long-take interviews, staged either inside old houses or outdoors against the backdrop of an ancient urban landscape. As mentioned, it is shot on 16mm from an elevated vantage point—perhaps a hill or even a castle—from which the camera frequently pans laterally, gradually revealing the surrounding terrain and embedding the speakers within a broader spatial and historical context.
The interviews are framed—both opened and closed—by sequences in which the group stages discussions about their experiences and their vision of the future. These moments feel almost theatrical and re-enacted, yet they reinforce the collective dimension of the project: revolution and the seizure of power by the proletariat as a shared horizon.
The ending is especially striking. After a succession of politically charged statements, the group disperses, each person leaving the hill and returning to their own path—an image that resonates as both a fragmentation and a continuation of the collective struggle just articulated.

Carcere in Italia (Prisons in Italy, 1973, according to the description given by the authors themselves, is the “recording of the revolt of prisoners barricaded on the roofs of Regina Coeli during the five-hour assault on the prison by the police and Carabinieri on the afternoon of July 28, 1973.”
However, this work is much more than a document of an event, as it also includes long theoretical reflections on the countless difficulties awaiting prisoners once released (usually determined by class divide), a short segment featuring the wife of a detainee and her child speaking with him from outside the prison walls, and, above all, a deeply moving interview that opens and closes the work—20 minutes shot in a single long take in dim light—in which an inmate recalls how he has been incarcerated since the age of nineteen and recounts the brutal beatings he repeatedly suffered at the hands of prison guards. A powerful example of how video militancy gave space to subaltern voices. 

Still from Lottando la vita – Lavoratori italiani a Berlino

Lottando la vita – Lavoratori italiani a Berlino (Fighting life – Italian Workers in Berlin, 1975) was made during a three-month residency in Berlin in 1975 on a grant from the Artists-in-Berlin Program. The work is centered on the living and working conditions of Italian migrant laborers in Berlin in 1975. This is one of Videobase’s works which better embodies the shift from militant cinema to militant video, exploring the possibilities offered by the new medium. The two major advantages video recorders brought with their advent were the ability to shoot for longer periods of time, and the possibility of playing what was shot almost immediately.
One exemplary moment encapsulates this transition and what it entails: we see and hear a worker describing the conditions faced by foreign laborers in Berlin and the role of the unions. In the following sequence, another comrade watches that testimony on a television set and comments on it. The image we have just seen is immediately re-mediated, reframed, and collectively discussed.

Not only it highlights the dialogical effect and power of the video within a video, but it points towards an epochal shift. The struggle moves from the cinema hall to the domestic screen: audiovisual militancy no longer relies on the theatrical space as its primary channel of expression; instead, it symbolically “occupies” what was then the medium of power par excellence—television. Videobase would push to the extreme this use of the remediated and reframed images through television sets in the aforementioned L’isola dell’isola (The island’s island) shot between 1974 and 1977 in the small island of San Pietro, Sardinia.

The extended recording time is put to striking use in Lavoratori italiani a Berlino in a fascinating scene where a group of young workers lounge around, half-asleep and half-dressed, chatting freely. The camera—as researcher Christian Uva notes “positioned as if it were one of them in the center of the room”—lingers on them allowing their conversation to unfold with an unusual sense of ease and intimacy.
Another important element that permeates this work is the dense layering of dialects and accents, which subtly reveals the diverse regions of Italy these migrant workers came from. At the same time, many of them lost the ability to speak fluently in their own language, and were not able to master the new one (German). A symbolic and real disorientation, expressing an identity in crisis when not in flux. 

Bibliography:

Anna Lajolo, Alfredo Leonardi, Guido Lombardi. L’isola dell’isola – Videobase, in Bianco e Nero settembre/dicembre, 1979, Edizioni dell’ateneo & bizzarri, 1979.

Galimberti, Jacopo. Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988), Verso, 2022.

Christian Uva. L’immagine politica: Forme del contropotere tra cinema, video e fotografia nell’Italia degli anni Settanta, Mimesis, 2015.

Taiwan International Documentary Festival 2026 (May 1-10) – preview

An embarrassment of riches awaits at this year’s Taiwan International Documentary Festival (May 1–10), now in its fifteenth edition. While the full programme, with its three major competitions—the Asian Vision Competition, International Competition, and Taiwan Competition—is well worth exploring in its entirety, I would like to highlight a few special sections that particularly caught my attention.

Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive examines how the scattered filmography of a people—subjected to decades of violence and now facing the threat of genocide—can itself become a form of resistance. This resistance unfolds not only through images, but also against them, as several experimental works here presented reflect on the entanglement between images and the construction of narratives of oppression. Notable examples include A Stone’s Throw (2024) by Razan Alsalah—one of my favorite documentaries of last year—The Diary of a Sky (2024) by the always engaging Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and A Fidai Film (2024) by Kamal Aljafari.

Another major highlight is Sensible but Unsayable — A Retrospective of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, a group whose distinctive aesthetic has profoundly shaped the trajectory of non-fiction cinema over the past fifteen years. The programme brings together twelve films, encompassing many of their key formal experiments, including the widely acclaimed Leviathan (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. Among the selections, I would especially recommend De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), also by the duo, and especially Expedition Content by Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati, which stands, in my view, as a defining work in the recent history of audiovisual practices.

Among the programmes featuring films I have not yet seen—but am particularly eager to—Reel Taiwan: The Late 1980s on Film stands out. If the late 1980s marked a period of profound social transformation and upheaval—the lifting of Martial Law in 1987 being a decisive turning point—it was also a moment of technological transition, as film began to give way to videotape and, eventually, digital media.
Framed by this dual shift, the programme presents four works by Lee Daw-ming and Hu Tai-li—the latter author of Voices of Orchid Island—, two filmmakers whose practice developed alongside—but distinct from—the more action-oriented Green Team (on which I have written at length elsewhere). Rather than engaging directly with sites of confrontation and resistance, their films—while maintaining a clear political stance—approach these issues from broader historical perspectives or through attention to marginalized communities, all while continuing to work on film. The four works included in the programme are:

Beyond the Killing Fields: Refugees on the Thai-Cambodian Border (Lee Daw-ming, 1986)
Songs of Pasta’ay (Hu Tai-li & Lee Daw-ming, 1988)
Beyond the Anti-DuPont Movement: Portraits of Some Social Activists (Lee Daw-ming, 1990)
Voice of the People (Lee Daw-ming, 1991)

It is also nice to see an homage to the late Tomonari Nishikawa, an experimental filmmaker whose work is featured in Stranger Than Documentary, a program highlighting cross-disciplinary approaches to nonfiction cinema, alongside the world premiere of the Public Television Service (PTS) production Water in the Balance by Ke Chin-yuan, and a well-deserved tribute to filmmaker Peter Watkins with a screening of Punishment Park (1971).

What Should We Have Done? (Fujino Tomoaki, 2024)

What Should We Have Done? was one of the most commercially successful independent documentaries released in Japanese theaters last year, earning more than 180 million yen after its initial release in December 2024, and remaining in cinemas for almost a year. The film directed by Fujino Tomoaki was also included in Kinema Junpo’s Best Bunka Eiga list for 2025, where it ranked second. Now What Should We Have Done? is again being screened in selected mini-theaters across the archipelago, giving me the chance to revisit it.

Produced by Fujino’s Zou-Shima, distributed in Japan by Tofoo Films, and completed with the support of Yamagata Dojo, a residency program for documentary filmmakers working on projects in progress, the film is built from video material—mostly shot digitally by the director himself over more than twenty years within his own family. These visual footage was recorded intermittently during his visits to the parents house, and traces the story of the director’s older sister, nicknamed Mako-chan or Mako, who suffered from mental illness, and of parents who, for almost her entire life, denied her condition and attempted to deal with it while almost never consulting a doctor.

Watching it for the second time gave me the chance to notice and appreciate things that, the first time around, were somewhat drowned out by the raw intensity of the experience. It was still a painful, heavy watch—perhaps even more piercing in some ways.
As Fujino has stated on various occasions, What Should We Have Done? is, from its very title, a document of a failure: the failure of an entire family—director included—toward his sister Mako, who began showing symptoms of schizophrenia in 1983, when she was 24. After allegedly consulting a specialist, the parents came to the conclusion that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her, and the family was discouraged from seeking psychiatric care for their daughter.

The film begins on a black screen, with the sister’s voice out of control, recorded by her brother on a Walkman in 1992. The video recordings started almost ten years later, in 2001, during the visits the director—now living in Kanagawa—made back home in Sapporo, Hokkaido. He began documenting his sister’s life and her relationship with their parents as a way of opposing and criticizing their treatment and decisions regarding her.

The use of low-resolution video feels absolutely right for conveying Mako’s miserable experience and, secondarily, that of the entire family. The rough texture of the images almost mirrors the emotional conditions in which everyone is trapped. On a filmmaking level, the documentary works largely thanks to the editing, which naturally shapes what the film ultimately becomes: a partial but real point of view on the tragic reality of the family. It must have been a near-Promethean task for Fujino and Asano Yumiko, who edited the film with the support of Hata Takeshi, to decide what to include, and especially when to cut away from some of the most distressing moments.

The structure, in this regard, is exemplary. The first part briefly sketches Mako’s life and that of her parents using photographs and home movies shot by the father in the early 1960s during their trip, for business, around the world. The couple was highly educated, both were researchers, and made the whole situation even more astonishing.
The film then moves forward chronologically, covering more than a decade beginning in 2001 and documenting the steady deterioration of Mako’s condition—and, alongside it, that of her parents. One day the director returns home and finds a padlock on the front door, installed by the parents so that Mako cannot escape. We learn, together with an appalled brother, that his sister has not left the house for almost a year.

The emotional peak of the documentary—and what must have been the lowest point in the relationship between daughter and parents, at least the one kept in the film—comes in a nighttime scene in which we realize that the mother, too, is beginning to show signs of dementia, while Mako’s piercing, bone-chilling screams fill the house.

The following scene—a black screen with written text—tells us that the parents finally gave up, and that Mako was hospitalized and given the appropriate medication.
The contrast between those unbearable screams and the later scene in which she calmly speaks, cooks, and washes the dishes is both astonishing and heartbreaking. It points toward what might have been—and that makes it all the more painful. 
The final part of the film is filled with tender, almost peaceful moments between the father, Mako, and her brother—and then with the inevitable ending, which I will not spoil.
An interesting layer is added when Fujino speaks with his father—now frail and in a wheelchair in a hospital—telling him about his wish to assemble all the footage shot over the past two decades and essentially asking, on camera, for his consent to do so.

Cinematographer Segawa Jun’ichi: Tracing Japanese Documentary Cinema through His Works

Of the many satellite events organized during last October’s Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival that I was unable to attend, one in particular caught my attention: “Cinematographer Segawa Jun’ichi: Tracing Japanese Documentary Cinema through His Works.”
This was an event organized to revisit the legacy of Segawa as a cameraman 30 years since his passing, and to kick off a retrospective that was held last December at the Athénée Français Cultural Center in Tokyo before traveling to Osaka’s Cinema Nouveau this February.

Although I had previously seen several documentaries in which Segawa worked as cinematographer, I only became fully aware of the real scope of his contribution to Japanese cinema about five years ago, while researching Haneda Sumiko’s Ode to Mt. Hayachine (1982). In Hayachine no fu (1984), her book on the film—part reflection on its genesis, part production diary—Haneda emphasizes several times the importance of having Segawa behind the camera.
In what is arguably her masterpiece, Haneda organized the shooting into two units. One group, led by Nishio Kiyoshi, focused primarily on filming the villages of Take and Ōtsugunai, while the other, lead by Segawa, concentrated on the alpine landscapes and the scenes shot near or at the summit of Mt. Hayachine, although for major sequences, such as the summer festival, the entire crew worked together. Haneda repeatedly stresses how decisive Segawa’s prior experience filming at high altitudes—and the fact that he was himself from Iwate Prefecture, where the mountain is located—proved to be for the success of the documentary.

Once I realized how central Segawa had been to the making of Ode to Mt. Hayachine, I began to look more closely at his career and discovered his involvement in several other landmark works in the history of Japanese documentary cinema such as Kamei Fumio’s Fighting Soldiers (1939) or Yanagisawa Hisao’s Children Before the Dawn (1968).
The retrospective moves precisely in this direction, offering a cartography of the evolution of Japanese nonfiction cinema, but also fiction films, through the major works in which Segawa played a key role.
24 works were screened in Tokyo and Osaka, here the list of the films in chronological order:

戦ふ兵隊 Fighting Soldiers (Kamei Fumio, 1939)
銀嶺の果て Snow Trail (Taniguchi Senkichi, 1947)
ジャコ萬と鉄 Jakoman and Tetsu (Taniguchi Senkichi, 1949)
新しい鉄 Atarashii tetsu (Ise Chōnosuke, 1956)
法隆寺 Hōryū-ji (Hani Susumu, 1958)
新しい製鉄所 Atarashī seitetsusho (Ise Chōnosuke, 1959)
留学生チュアスイリン Chua Swee Lin, Exchange Student (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1965)
夜明け前の子どもたち Children Before the Dawn (Yanagisawa Hisao, 1968)
仕事＝重サ×距離 三菱長崎造船所からのレポート Work = Weight x Distance Report from Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard (Matsukawa Yasuo, 1971)
風 The Wind (Segawa Jun’ichi, 1977)
遠い一本の道 The Far Road (Hidari Sachiko, 1977)
不安な質問 Anxious Questions (Matsukawa Yasuo, 1979)
海とお月さまたち Fishing Moon (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1980)
水俣の図・物語 The Minamata Mural (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1981)
早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine (Haneda Sumiko, 1982)
アントニー・ガウディー Antonio Gaudì (Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1984)
奈緒ちゃん Nao-chan (Ise Shin’ichi, 1995)
ルーペ カメラマン瀬川順一の眼 Magnifying Glass: The Eyes of Photographer Jun’ichi Segawa (Ise Shin’ichi, 1997)
回想・瀬川順一 土本典昭、2003年3月13日 (Tsutsui Takefumi, 2025)

Unfortunately, I was able to spend only one day in each city, but I managed nonetheless to see or revisit some milestones of Japanese documentary cinema.
In Tokyo, I attended a screening of Ode to Mt. Hayachine. Although I had watched it multiple times for my research, this was my first experience seeing it on 16mm and in a theatrical setting—and it was a revelation. The more lyrical sequences were, as expected, awe-inspiring, yet what stayed with me most after this viewing was Haneda and her team’s remarkable ability to weave an intricate and expansive audiovisual tapestry, in which people, history, folkloric practices, economic realities, non-human forces, and the mountain itself are all delicately embroidered into an ever-changing, open-ended whole.

My day in Osaka was more densely packed, with screenings of Jakoman and Tetsu—one of the few fiction films included in the retrospective, and perhaps the most handsome Mifune Toshirō has ever looked on screen—The Minamata Mural, one of the most powerful works Tsuchimoto Noriaki directed on the Minamata disaster (I wrote more about it here), and Hani Susumu’s Hōryū-ji, which left such a deep impression on me that I decided to write about it separately. Like Hōryū-ji, Antonio Gaudí (1975)—the fourth film I saw in Osaka—engages with art, though of a different kind from the Buddhist sculpture housed at the temple in Nara. The way Segawa Jun’ichi’s camera and Teshigahara’s Hiroshi’s direction capture Gaudí’s sinuous buildings and imagination—enhanced by the music by Takemitsu Tōru—is hypnotic. For my part, the film could easily have lasted six hours.

I’m not sure whether the retrospective will travel to other Japanese cities, I suspect it will not, but I secretly hope it might eventually make its way to the Chūbu region region, where I live.
The event was planned and organized by Tsutsui Takefumi, Tanaka Shinpei, Nakamura Daigo, and Okada Hidenori, and was accompanied by an excellent catalogue (in Japanese), featuring essays by film historians, scholars, and directors — including a contribution by Hamaguchi Ryūsuke.

In Their Traces (Kobayashi Shigeru, 2025)

Kobayashi Shigeru is an important figure in Japanese documentary cinema, he was mentored by Yanagisawa Hisao—with whom he worked as an assistant director in his last two films, そっちゃないこっちゃ コミュニティ・ケアーへの道（1982) and 風とゆききし（1989)—but is probably best known for his long-standing collaboration with Satō Makoto. Kobayashi was behind the camera and an integral part of the creative process on both Living on the River Agano (Aga ni ikiru, 1992) and Memories of Agano (Aga no kioku, 2004), and in more recent years he has also been a key force in preserving and reviving the legacy of the latter film, as well as Satō’s work more broadly. Their collaboration extended also in the opposite direction with Satō editing Kobayashi’s And Life Goes On (Watashi no kisetsu, 2004). Unfortunately, of the films directed by Kobayashi I have so far seen only Dryads in a Snow Valley (Kaze no hamon, 2015), a beautiful documentary set in a mountain area between Niigata and Nagano Prefecture, which also functions as a kind of homage to Satō’s cinema.

Kobayashi was born in Niigata Prefecture and, from a young age, became involved in groups supporting the victims of Minamata disease. One of the close friends he made during this period began, some thirty years later, to experience violent flashbacks related to the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child. Around the same time, Kobayashi met a female photographer—also a survivor—who was using her photographs to support others who had endured similar experiences. These encounters prompted Kobayashi to confront his own past, suffering and growing up in an abusive family. It was at this point that he decided to make a documentary film, with the aim of helping audiences understand the reality of sexual abuse from the survivors’ point of view.

In Their Traces (Tamashii no kiseki) was presented last year in Yamagata and later on at the Tokyo International Film Festival. I missed the film during my stay in Yamagata, so I was very eager to catch up with it, and I’m glad I finally did.

The film opens with a phone call in which Kobayashi’s elderly friend tells him, matter-of-factly, that she tried to hang herself the previous night, unable to bear the recurring memories of the repeated abuse she suffered as an elementary school student.
The rawness of the subject matter, combined with the gentleness and respect with which the film is constructed, is one of the elements that makes In Their Traces such a remarkable and powerful viewing experience. A crucial decision in achieving this balance was Kobayashi’s choice to include himself as one of the film’s subjects. By foregrounding the violence he experienced—without lingering on it or allowing it to dominate the narrative—Kobayashi establishes a bond of trust with the viewer, while also underscoring the trust he built with the women who appear in the film.

It is this transparency and proximity to the other subjects that allows Kobayashi to build, on screen, resonances and parallels between the three women and their traumatic experiences. This transparency—and the trust it engenders—becomes even more powerful when the documentary, through the words of his friend (“you shouldn’t make the documentary” I’m paraphrasing), turns back on itself, questioning the very premise of the project.

The formal strategy of positioning the camera (operated by Oda Kaori), Kobayashi as director, and Kobayashi as participant as three active agents within the film’s reality enables to create a dialogic structure through which the women’s testimonies emerge in a touching and heart-wrenching manner, without ever feeling exploitative or overly dramatic. On the contrary, it is precisely the matter-of-fact quality of some of the exchanges we hear—regarding suicidal thoughts and experiences of sexual violence—that most deeply affects the viewer, making the film a profoundly empathetic experience.
This effect is further achieved by interspersing the highly affecting scenes of conversation with striking black-and-white photographs taken by one of the women, as well as with shots of the countryside and the sea. The ocean, with its vast expanse stretching toward the horizon, has a special meaning, especially for one of the women, who describes it as offering a sense of openness and thus hope.

A fascinating point raised by the film is that in many cases the abusive fathers or male figures were themselves survivors of war or people whose lives were severely affected by war. Kobayashi has commented when talking about the documentary that his own family was reimpatriated from the former Manchuria, bearing the weight of war with them. 

In conclusion, while the film loses some of its power, in my view, in the final thirty minutes—essentially from the point at which a workshop discussion about the making of the film is introduced—I found the first hour or so to be among the finest documentary filmmaking I have encountered in recent years.

Though I’m His Daughter それでも私は (Nagatsuka Yō, 2025)

On March 20, 1995—the day sarin nerve gas was released in several cars of the Tokyo subway—Japan experienced what is often regarded, together with the Great Hanshin earthquake two months earlier, a watershed moment in the recent history of the archipelago. Much has already been written and said about the attack carried out by members of the Aum Shinrikyō cult, which killed 13 people and injured hundreds, about the motivations behind it, and about the figure of Asahara Shōkō, the group’s leader, who was eventually executed in July 2018. Within documentary cinema, it is worth recalling at least Mori Tatsuya’s A (1998) and A2 (2001), two key works exploring the sect’s inner workings after Asahara’s arrest and its relationship with the mass media.

Far less attention, however, has been paid to Asahara’s family and to how the tragedy that unfolded three decades ago also affected his closest relatives. Most of them, understandably, changed their names and had their identities protected—especially the children, who were still minors at the time. The sole exception is Matsumoto Rika, Asahara’s third daughter (his real name being Matsumoto Chizuo), who was twelve years old at the time of the attack and had been designated as her father’s spiritual successor. A few years ago, she chose to reclaim her real name, come forward publicly, and stop hiding.

Though I’m His Daughter, a documentary directed by Nagatsuka Yō and released in Japan last year, investigates the reasons behind this decision and follows Rika’s life over a period of roughly six years, from 2018 to 2024. Although the film was screened in a limited number of cinemas across the archipelago last year, it appears to have maintained a relatively low profile, as addressing Aum Shinrikyō and its members remains a delicate and problematic subject—both for the Japanese state and for public opinion, which often, and rightly, calls for respect toward the victims of the attack.

Significantly, the film opens with a meeting between Rika and the brother of one of the victims of a manslaughter case that occurred in Aichi prefecture in 1979 (the so called Handa Hoken Kinsatsujin Jiken)—an encounter initiated by the latter—which immediately sets the film’s thematic tone. One of the documentary’s central concerns is precisely the way in which the relatives of victims and those of perpetrators come to share—to different degrees, naturally—a common fate: that of carrying an almost unbearable burden for the rest of their lives.

Yet the theme that perhaps emerges most forcefully from the film is the complex and deeply ambivalent relationship between father and daughter. While unequivocally condemning her father’s actions, Rika is shown to retain many positive personal memories of him. She cannot make sense of how the violence carried out by the group could coexist with one of its central tenets—the prohibition against killing, even insects. Moreover, following his arrest, she was never able to speak with him or ask about the true motivations behind his actions—both because officials did not permit such a meeting and because Asahara is said to have descended into a state of mental confusion after his arrest, to the point that he was reportedly no longer able to speak coherent Japanese. The film also shows briefly Tatsuya Mori, director of the aforementioned A and A2, attending a meeting held prior to Asahara’s execution in support of granting him proper medical treatment, so that it might be determined whether he was truly the one who ordered the killings—and why—two of the most significant unresolved questions hanging over both the film and Japanese society.

Rika learned of her father’s execution from a friend who was watching the news on television. At that moment, the director was understandably unable to film her; instead, Rika recorded herself, along with her sister Umi—whose identity is protected by the blurring of her face. The resulting footage shows her sister having an emotional breakdown while riding on a bus or in a car.

The emotional ambivalence towards his father is compounded by the discrimination Rika continues to face as she attempts to navigate Japanese society. Following the execution, Rika became the target of a wave of online harassment, with social media flooded by death threats and messages directing rage toward her. In this section of the film, screenshots of tweets and replies appear on screen, one of which starkly encapsulates the situation: “you have no right to be happy.” Finding employment, opening a bank account, or sustaining a romantic relationship all prove to be nearly insurmountable challenges. As a result, Rika experiences recurring bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts; here again, video footage—this time shot by her sister Umi—is used.
The death wish Rika harbored as a teenager after her father’s arrest—she remained in the group for four years following the attacks—painfully resurfaces. Her memories of that period are rendered on screen through harrowing sequences depicted in pencil animation.

As a way of confronting and reconnecting with their past, Umi and Rika travel to their father’s hometown, where his family once ran a tatami shop, reminiscing about a time when they still saw him as a caring figure. During the same trip, they also visit relatives who had disowned them and completely severed ties with the Matsumoto family.
It is at this point in the film that Nagatsuka decides to ask Rika what he considers the most important question: “Why did such a happy and fulfilled person come to do those horrible things?” The question remains unanswered, as no one is able to make sense of what happened in his life.

The final thirty minutes of the film focus on Rika’s efforts to break free from the depressive spiral into which she had fallen—exacerbated by the pandemic—and to forge an independent life, partly through her passion for mountaineering and bodybuilding, pursuits she approaches at a semi-professional level. 

The film opens with the director’s own narration, and his voice—along with the rationale behind the making of the documentary—serves as the thread connecting the work as a whole. Nagatsuka frequently appears on screen, both during and after the pandemic, including in the inevitable Zoom split-screen sequences, a choice I found visually weak. The film is at its strongest in its first hour or so, concluding with the onset of the pandemic and the visit to Asahara’s hometown, when the editing is tighter and the images are less overtly—and cheaply—emotional. The film’s concluding shot, a drone-filmed image from the top of a mountain, exemplifies the opposite tendency and ultimately feels inappropriate.

Though I’m His Daughter may not be without faults, but it possesses the considerable merit of posing difficult and compelling questions, even for viewers who may not share its underlying premises.

My Father, burned (Doi Haruka, 1994)

This short article could be considered an addendum to the piece I wrote several months ago about found footage films, compilation documentary and recycled cinema in Japan.

When Collaborative Cataloging Japan, the online platform dedicated to experimental and avant-garde cinema in the archipelago, made available Doi Haruka’s He Was Here, and You Are Here (なかのあなた いまのあなた 1985) a couple of years ago, it was for me a revelation.
The short film is an impressive and poetic debut centered on the idea of externalising one’s own memories, wishes, and fantasies as images projected onto walls, plates, or even the filmmaker’s own body. He Was Here, and You Are Here crystallizes the inventiveness of a particular approach to personal cinema in Japan during the 1990s, while at the same time standing as an exception—a singular and highly idiosyncratic experiment within the realm of Japanese “self-documentary” of that period.

For the whole month of December 2025, another work by Doi, My Father, burned (父が、燃えた 1994), is available to stream on the platform.

While He Was Here, and You Are Here marked Doi’s debut, My Father, burned represents her final foray into filmmaking, a career that lasted less than a decade. In the following years, Doi has been active in the field of Japanese music under the pseudonym HALUKA.

The short film originated in Doi’s discovery of old photographs of her father, along with home movies he had shot himself. As Collaborative Cataloging Japan notes, My Father, burned—described by the filmmaker as an “anti–home movie” —is a rare example of personal film that

illustrates Doi’s complicated relationship with her deceased father. A distanced fascination replaces the nostalgic or sentimental aspects one might expect in a film of this kind. Yet the sense of the power of the found image to shock and disarm remains — the familiar face that stares out from the rediscovered album; the laughter of a past self, seen through the eyes of one deceased. Through this cinematic reflection, Doi questions the image she had of her father prior to this posthumous mediation, even seeing similarities between his violent tendencies and her own rebellious nature.

The film is not only a reflection on Doi’s difficult relationship with her father after his passing, and on how memories shape who we are and who we become, but also a more subtle contemplation of the latent potential inherent in the reactivation of audiovisual footage—here, personal material.
Home movies shot by her father when she was little, together with old photographs of him, resurrect the “shadow” of his physical body, helping to construct a different image of the man and an alternative personal reality once inhabited by the filmmaker. Doi’s efforts here, albeit on a smaller and more personal scale, mirror those at work in the best examples of archival or found footage cinema, which “draw on archival material to breathe new life into it and construct new constellations of meaning—capable of questioning the present through a reconfiguration of the past.” (Cau, 2023)

My Father, burned represents thus a prime—if rare—example of the convergence of personal and archival cinema in Japan during the 1990s. This is particularly evident not only from what has been described above, but also from the film’s formal structure, in which the filmmaker’s thoughts are articulated as a form of commentary or narration accompanying the old photographs and home movies presented on screen.

It is also fascinating that the filmmaker briefly reflects, toward the end of the work, on the ethics of filming a dying person—when her father was ill in the hospital. Although this comment is not further developed, it remains a very relevant topic today and sheds light on Doi’s talent and her acute awareness of everything that surrounds the act of filming and filmmaking itself.

References:

Maurizio Cau, Rifigurare il passato. Il cinema d’archivio di Sergei Loznitsa in “Cinema e Storia 2023. Found footage: il cinema, i media, l’archivio” edited by Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, Rubettino edizioni, 2023.

Indigenous with a Capital ‘I’: Indigenous Documentaries from 1994 to 2000 – TIDF 2021

This is a translation and a partial rewriting of a piece I wrote for Alias (Saturday supplement of the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto) in 2021.

In 2003, Māori director and theorist Barry Barclay proposed the idea of a “Fourth Cinema.” Building on and expanding the concept of “Third Cinema” as theorized by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in the late 1960s, Fourth Cinema designates a practice centered on the Indigenous gaze and Indigenous viewers. Rooted in Barclay’s background in documentary, the concept was initially conceived as an audiovisual practice in non-fiction—works created by Indigenous authors, within Indigenous communities, and for Indigenous audiences.

Paying homage to Barclay’s reflections, the twelfth edition of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival devoted a section of its official program to works by Indigenous filmmakers from the island, produced in the final years of the twentieth century (1994-2000). This was a period when long-standing questions of indigenous identity, resistance, and decolonisation converged with—and were amplified by—the revolutionary arrival of small, portable digital video cameras.

This technological shift, coupled with a transformed socio-political landscape, opened new avenues of self-expression for ethnic groups who, until then, had been confined to the roles of mere actors or spectators in their own representation.
It is worth noting that this followed the profound transformations of the last two decades of the 20th century—a period of seismic historical change for Taiwan, beginning with the lifting of martial law in 1987 and the subsequent democratisation of the country. On a cinematic level, this era also witnessed the rise of the Taiwanese New Wave and, on a smaller scale, the emergence of a grassroots documentary movement exemplified by the Green Team.

The history of Taiwan is one of centuries-long colonial domination. Its arts, customs, traditions, land, language, and landscape all bear traces of the successive layers of a history that, accumulating over time, have shaped the island as we know it today. The various Indigenous peoples who inhabited Taiwan for millennia first faced invasions by the Dutch and the Spanish, followed by the arrival of Han Chinese settlers from the mainland, and later domination under the Qing dynasty and the Japanese Empire.

Today, the island officially recognizes sixteen Indigenous groups, each with its own language and distinct culture. In most cases, these communities—despite enduring countless challenges—continue to strive to keep their rituals, languages, and traditions alive and meaningful, upholding alternative ways of life in resistance to the cultural homogenization brought by modernity.

By the late 1990s, the advent of digital cinema and the spread of small, affordable video cameras—“a theology of liberation,” to borrow a striking expression from Filipino director Lav Diaz—offered Taiwan’s Indigenous groups the possibility, finally and for the first time, of becoming active agents in their own visual representation, adding their voices to the island’s rich mediascape.

C’roh Is Our Name

Indigenous with a Capital ‘I’: Indigenous Documentaries from 1994 to 2000 brings together seventeen works—each between thirty and fifty minutes in length—made by Indigenous filmmakers, focusing on the lives, struggles, and resilience of their communities in contemporary Taiwan.
In New Paradise (1999) by Laway Talay, members of the Pangcah ethnic group leave their ancestral lands to seek work in other parts of the island, only to encounter exploitation and a profound sense of non-belonging—perhaps the most recurrent theme running through the works featured in this special program. This feeling of displacement is often subtle, but at times it emerges openly and even defiantly, as in C’roh Is Our Name (1997) by Mayaw Biho, a short documentary that follows a regatta annually organized by Taiwan’s Han population—the ethnic majority of Chinese origin that constitutes most of the island’s inhabitants. For the first time in the competition’s history, a group of Pangcah—who had traditionally lent their nautical skills to other teams—chose instead to form a team composed entirely of their own members.

For members of these communities, holding a camera also means gaining the ability to recount and preserve ancestral traditions and forms of knowledge that might otherwise vanish with the passing of time. This is the case in several works devoted to capturing the memories of elders—such as former tribal chiefs or weavers—who embody the living memory of their people.

One of the most compelling works presented at the festival is Children in Heaven (1997), also by Mayaw Biho. Although it focuses on a specific ethnic group, the situation it portrays is, sadly, all too familiar in contexts marked by stark economic inequality. For a time, a small Pangcah community was forced to watch, year after year, as the government demolished the shacks they called home, deemed illegal structures. Surrounded by garbage and ruins, the children who grew up amid this Sisyphean cycle of demolition and rebuilding came to transform the recurring tragedy into a kind of game.

In this film, as in all the others in the program, the camera’s perspective is never detached or neutral. Aesthetically and narratively, it knows—and shows—from the very first scenes where it stands. The images are often low-resolution and deliberately anti-spectacular—what Hito Steyerl would call a “poor image.” It is a gaze that, precisely because it comes from within, does not judge—even when, as in Song of the Wanderer (1996) by Yang Ming-hui, it exposes the problems, contradictions, and even the violence that many of these communities face. Instead, it offers both a perspective and a means of expression to those who, until now, have had none.

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2025 – preview

It’s that time of year again: autumn arrives, bringing with it a cascade of film festivals around the globe. Just to name a few of the major ones in Asia, we have Busan and Tokyo, along with the Image Forum Festival, the biggest event dedicated to experimental cinema in Japan. December will also see the debut of the newly established Aichi Nagoya International Animation Film Festival in Nagoya. But I digress.

One of the oldest and most prestigious festivals in Japan is without doubt the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, an event I’ve been attending for more than a decade now (and about which I’ve written various reports and reflections on this very website).

I plan to attend this year’s edition (October 9–16) as well, though life is unpredictable and you never know what might happen in the “real” world. Below are some of the screenings and programs that have caught my eye and that I’m especially looking forward to.

Being a biennial festival, YIDFF is not the place to see world premieres, but rather a chance to catch up with significant films already screened elsewhere or to discover under-the-radar documentaries, often from the Asian continent. This year’s International Competition will showcase Park by So Yo-Hen, which won the Grand Prize at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival last year, and With Hasan in Gaza by Kamal Aljafari, presented at Locarno a couple of months ago. Aljafari will also present his more experimental A Fidai Film in the program Palestine – Memory of the Land, a work I am eager to revisit on the big screen, this time with more information and conext to help decipher it.

Returning to the competition lineup, Letters to My Dead Parents by Ignacio Agüero weaves together personal stories with the history of the labor movement in Chile, while I Was, I Am, and I Will Be! by Itakura Yoshiyuki promises an exploration of Kamagasaki, a town of day laborers, at a moment when the city was preparing for Expo 2025.

New Asian Currents has usually been the section where I’ve made the most discoveries over my years of attending Yamagata. While many of these came from last-minute decisions or suggestions by friends and fellow critics on site, this time there are a couple of titles I’m especially eager to check out. Collective Dreams Stitched into December by Bappadittya Sarkar—a patchwork of interconnected stories set in the Indian city of Jaipur—promises to satiate my appetite for more documentaries from this vast country. Meanwhile, The Tales of the Tale by Song Cheng-ying and Hu Chin-ya captures the stories and dreams of an old mining town of Houtong in Taiwan.

In Perspective Japan, The Yoshida-ryo Dormitory by Fujikawa Keizō documents the ongoing battle to keep the country’s oldest student dormitory open—a struggle deeply intertwined with the social fabric of the city and the political activism of Japan at large (you can read more here). In the same section, Spring, On the Shores of Aga by Komori Haruka carries a special resonance for me, as it is connected to Satō Makoto, his cinematic legacy and the Agano area.

Every edition of the festival offers audiences a major retrospective, and this year it is Unscripted: The Art of Direct Cinema—32 works spanning five decades of a documentary mode that revolutionized the way non-fiction films are conceived, produced, and filmed. Although I have already seen most of these documentaries – but not all!- this is a perfect opportunity to revisit some “classics” and to gain deeper insights through the accompanying discussions.

Among the peripheral screenings and events, one that stands out is Feb 11, 1990 Rough Cut Screening: The Other Version—four and a half hours of material documenting the very first YIDFF in 1989, footage not included in Iizuka Toshio’s A Movie Capital (1991).
For those, like me, fascinated by Sanrizuka, the resistance against the construction of Narita Airport, and the legacy of Ogawa Pro, the special presentation Sanrizuka: Disappearing Landscapes – The Heta Project Screening is not to be missed. Another highlight is the invitation of Voices of the Silenced, this year’s closing film—a reflection on counter-archives and the suppression of minorities in Japan (particularly the Korean minority) by Park Soo-nam and Park Maeui. The documentary screened in Berlin two years ago, but YIDFF lists it as 2025, so I wonder whether the film has been reworked.

All of these films, however, feel like just planets orbiting around the central sun: Palestinian cinema, and Palestine itself—the true core of this year’s festival, even if the number of works is not overwhelming. At least, that is how I perceive it. Palestine, its culture, and the struggle of its people have always held a special place at YIDFF. This year, while the dedicated program Palestine—Memory of the Land features only eight films, additional Palestinian works will appear across other sections, and I expect that conversations at nearly every venue will inevitably turn toward the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

As it is the case for the Direct Cinema section, I’ve already seen most of the films in the Palestinian program, but here more than ever I’m eager for the post-screening discussions, and for the chance to share on the big screen—together with other viewers—some true masterpieces of political cinema.

The documentary I’d like to highlight in these closing lines is Fertile Memory (1980) by Michel Khleifi. When I first encountered it, the film was a revelation. It reflects a culture and a society oppressed and dispossessed by the Israeli state from the outside, while at the same time telling the story of two women struggling to navigate the shifts and tensions within Palestinian society itself.

What is equally striking is how the film unfolds as a meditation on landscapes: the geographical terrain, where human history and geological time are layered, and the human landscape of faces—faces that reveal emotions, hopes, regrets, and anger. In this sense, the breathtaking images of the Palestinian land, with its warm colors and sinuous contours, both contrast with and converse with the more intimate shots of the two women moving and working inside their homes. Particularly moving are the images of food and its preparation, as well as those moments when one of the protagonists is framed between a door left ajar and the jamb. We should keep the door open and continue to talk and discuss about Palestine, its people and memories.

See the full line-up here

See you in Yamagata!




Film journal, spring 2025: Death Education, Keiko Kishi Eternally Rebellious, Landscape Hunter.

Death Education (Yuxuan Ethan Wu, 2025) is a well-shot and edited short film about how a group of young people in China think about death. The reflection is, of course, universal and is based on a program created by a high school teacher in which a class of students buries unidentified ashes in a public cemetery on Tomb Sweeping Day.
As explained at the end of the short: “Every March, Teacher Qian Jianbo holds a death education class for his students, opening up the conversation about death for the first time”.
Though the film is overly stylized in places – the slow motion of the petals scattered on a tomb was unnecessary – it succeeds in creating a somber and meditative mood that envelops the viewer. This is especially evident when images of human ashes, cremation facilities, and graves are combined with soothing music and the voices of the students reading their diary entries.

Keiko Kishi: Eternally Rebellious (Pascal-Alex Vincent, 2023) is an intriguing portrait of a Japanese cinema icon. Through interviews with the actress and film scholars, as well as home movies and clips from her most famous films directed by Ozu, Ichikawa, and Kobayashi, this French production paints a fascinating, albeit partial and incomplete, portrait of Kishi.
While the film is not particularly notable for its formal elements, I found it nonetheless interesting for several reasons. For instance, it recounts Kishi’s decision to move to France and marry director Yves Ciampi in 1957 after he filmed her as a protagonist in Typhoon Over Nagasaki. I was also surprised to learn about her involvement with the Ninjin Club, an actors’ agency founded by Kishi, Kuga Yoshiko, and Arima Ineko in 1954, that later became a production company. For two decades, the Ninjin Club produced some of the best and most boundary-pushing films of the time, including the Masaki Kobayashi Human Condition trilogy (1959–1961), Shinoda Masahiro’s Pale Flower (1964), Kinuyo Tanaka’s Love Under the Crucifix (1962), and Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964). Kwaidan is now considered a masterpiece, but it was a box-office bomb at the time, causing the company to file for bankruptcy. To pay off the debt, Kishi appeared on many TV programs in both France and Japan in the 1970s. Later in life, she shifted her career completely and started working as a photojournalist, often visiting war zones around the world.

Landscape Hunter (2021) is an experimental documentary commissioned by Chiayi Art Museum, Taiwan, and directed by Liao Hsiu-hui and the Your Bros. Filmmaking Group, a collective responsible for another fascinating experiment in nonfiction, Dorm (2021).
The film centers on Fang Ching-mian (also known as Uncle Hsin-kao), an indigenous man of the Bunun people who was a passionate amateur mountain photographer. Seventy years ago, he climbed and took photos of Mount Jade (Yu Shan), the highest mountain in Taiwan, more than a thousand times. Landscape Hunter is structured like a mosaic composed of several overlapping facets: a nonlinear, oblique, and opaque work that interweaves Uncle Hsin-kao’s shots of Yu Shan’s locations; interviews with mountaineers discussing the significance of his endeavors for the discipline; Black-and-white alpine scenery; Bunun words; and reflections on representing and capturing reality, as well as an interrogation of the absence of indigenous peoples in the history of photography.

This absence reminded me of a presentation at the last Niigata International Animation Film Festival in March. A group from the Taichung International Animation Festival concluded their showcase of animated works produced in Taiwan with a question: What is missing from Taiwan’s animation landscape? The answer is the voices of indigenous peoples.
While this is also true in the documentary field, the technological revolution brought about by video cameras and DV camcorders gave rise to a wave of indigenous-made works in the last decade of the 20th century. This was the focus of a fascinating program titled Indigenous with a Capital ‘I’ which was presented at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival in 2020. An interrogation of the relation between Photography and indigenous peoples in Taiwan is also at the center of the impressive MATA-The island’s Gaze by Cheng Li-Ming.

The self-reflexive and somewhat obscure qualities of Landscape Hunter can be traced back to the collective’s working methods and the professional backgrounds of its members. Some are video artists, some are architects, some are art history researchers, and some are theater critics. Field research, creative workshops, unforeseen circumstances, and flexible scripts are fundamental to their works and they describe their approach as “filmmaking as a method for reinterpreting reality, endowing it with an aesthetic form, and transforming it into a medium of thinking.”