Category: Japan

Kobe Documentary Film Festival 2015 第7回神戸ドキュメンタリー映画祭 (Oct 31st – Nov 10th)

In the autumn film festival madness, there are more film fests between October and November than stars in the sky, a very tiny but special place is occupied by the Kobe Documentary Film Festival,  an event established in 2009 at the Kobe Planet Film Archive. An important place for cinephiles and cinema lovers, the archive is a small structure, the theatre has only 38 seats, set up in 2007 and currently managed by Yasui Yoshio, one of the most renowed film historians and archivists of Japan. Incidentally Kobe has a special relationship to the seventh art, Edison’s Kinetoscope was imported to Kobe in 1896 and one year after the city was also the first place in Japan where the Lumiere brothers brought their Cinematographe. 

In these 7 years the mini festival, it’s more like a retrospective than a “real” fest, has presented works of Yanagisawa Hisao and Tsuchimoto Noriaki – in its 2 first editions, a special devoted to the great Tōhōku Earthquake and documentary in 2011, and the following year a retrospective on NDU and Nunokawa Tetsurō, a showcase that I was able to attend, a real discovery that allowed me to deepen my knowledge of one of the most important Japanese film collective of the 60s and 70s, a real treat. 

Kobe Documentary Film Festival kicks off tomorrow, October 31st,  and will last until November 10th. This year the main focus won’t be on one filmmaker or a movement in particular, but the screenings will be more varied. Discovering Images—The Age of Matsumoto Toshio, a documentary on Matsumoto Toshio by Takefumi Tsutsui, almost 12 hours (the work is divided in 5 parts) to retrace the career of one of the most important Japanese filmmakers and theorists of the post-bellic period, is maybe the most important to me. London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2001) by Patrick Keiller, under the wave, on the ground (波のした、土のうえ) by Komori Haruka and Seo Natsumi will also be screened, and last but not least a special selection from the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, 5 films screened in the last 25 years at the prestigious event. 

Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend the festival this year, what I really wanted to see was the massive documentary on Matsumoto – I missed it at Yamagata as well, and under the wave, on the ground, but I’m sure there will be more chances to catch up with them. 

You can find the program here (only Japanese)

Three documentaries by Matsubayashi Yoju out on DVD (with Eng sub)

  
ZakkaFilms, a label specialised in Japanese movies, has announced three new releases to be included in its Filmmakers’ Market, Flowers and Troops (花の兵隊, 2009), Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape (相馬看花, 2012) and The Horses of Fukushima (祭の馬, 2013) all of them by Matsubayashi Yoju. According to ZakkaFilms homepage Filmmakers’ Market is “a new marketplace for documentaries that tears down the walls separating Japanese filmmakers and foreign viewers and allows filmmakers to bring their English-subtitled works in for direct sale (..) All of the DVDs are packaged by the directors and producers themselves, so some may have only Japanese on the package or in the booklet (we note as such below), but and all of them have English subtitles.” 
I had the chance to see two of the three documentaries, those about Fukushima, here in Japan on the big screen. While I liked Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape – it’s in fact one of my favourite movies about Japan’s 3.11 triple disaster together with Fujiwara Toshi’s No Man’s Zone (無人地帯, 2012) – I couldn’t really connect with The Horses of Fukushima.

Here the synopsis of Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape taken from ZakkaFilms homepage

The Enei district of Minami Soma town lies within the 20 km exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In early April 2011, immediately after the devastating tsunami and nuclear meltdown forced people to evacuate the area, filmmaker Yoju Matsubayashi rushed here with relief goods. From a chance meeting with city councilor Kyoko Tanaka, he began making this film. Living together with the evacuees in school classrooms designated as temporary refuge centers, he captured an extraordinary period in the lives of the local people. Interspersed with humorous episodes and deep emotions, the film delves into memories of a local culture that has been taken away by the tragedy.

More the focusing on the place and the ruins, avoiding whenever possible a kind of disaster porn that was very present on TV and in many movies soon after the earthquake, Matsubayashi turns his camera towards the people, their memories and their stories. The more the documentary approaches its center and core, the more the shaky images and those shot from moving cars disappear, the pace of the movie itself becoming slow and more contemplative.  The landscape, the lost landscape, is recreated in the film by the words and recollections of the people to whom Matsubayashi talked, or better by the conversations between them. It’s also a time-landscape, the memories of the elderly have the power to convey and embrace larger historical cycles, the conditions before the war, the poverty of the post-bellic period and the resulting process of industrialisation that forever changed the face and the balance of forces in the area, the devil pact with the nuclear industry being the most prominent one.

Flowers and Troops seems to be an interesting piece of work as well, a movie that explores the lives of Japanese soldiers who refused to come back to Japan from Thailand and Burma after the Pacific War, a theme that Imamura Shōhei, Matsubayashi studied with him, delved into during the 70s with several made-for-TV documentaries (they’re included in this box-set). 

You can order and purchase the three DVDs by Matsubayashi directly on ZakkaFilms homepage. 

Yamagata Doc Film Fest, report – day 3 and awards

My final day in Yamagata (October 12th) was a bit more relaxed than the previous two, the festival fatigue started to kick in and the nights spent talking & drinking at Komian did the rest. There were many movies I really wanted to see, Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) by Abbas Fahdel, Ospina’s It all Started at the End and others. Unfortunatly all of them were screened around the same time in the afternoon, and I had to choose one, so finally I opted for Ospina’s, my personal way of completing the discovery of the Cali Group and the independent cinema of Colombia between the 70s and 80s. It All Started at the End is a long and absorbing work that goes back to the beginning of the movement, and using a mix of styles and images (footage, digital, mobile phone’s camera) tells the story of a group of friends and artists who revolutionised cinema in Colombia.

In the morning I attended the screening of a TV documentary (actually a mokumentary) made in 2006 by Mori Tatsuya and Murakami Kenji (edited by Matsue Tetsuaki) Documentary:  Truth or Lies「ドキュメンタリーは嘘をつく」A work that plays with and criticises the way non-fiction is usually planned and made on TV, funny at times but not always entertaining and cutting, this short film has nonetheless the quality of making the audience think and let them see what’s happening behind the camera. 

  

In the evening and as my final event for this edition of the festival, I decided to attend a symposium titled Creating a Space for Film, a discussion among six participants from different countries, Dwi Sujanti Nugraheni, Marta Rodríguez, Teng Mangansakan, Sakai Ko, Oki Hiroyuki, Carlos Gómez. Everyone of them brought and talk about his/her experience in creating a space for documentary, with indigenous people in Colombia for Marta Rodrigez and Carlos Gomez, in Indonesian schools with basically no budget for Nugraheni, in Sendai working with old people to find the still existing minwa (folklore in the oral tradition) for Sakai Ko, and in the Philippines in markets and basketball courts for Mangansakan. Very different stories and backgrounds, some governments opposing documentary like Indonesia, other supporting cinema like the Philippines, but everybody seemed to agree that what is fundamental and crucial is to build cinema and documentary literacy, through schools, workshops, festival and other activities. Without visual /media literacy there are no chances to have future generations of filmmakers and and audience capable of understanding and appreciating non-fiction cinema.

  
In conclusion, this year as two years ago, attending YIDFF was for me a really reinvigorating and fascinating experience, I didn’t see as many movies as I wanted to, but I as I wrote in the previous posts, there were some nice discoveries and above all I had the chance to meet, talk and exchange opinions with many filmmakers and film-festival people. The only downside to it is that I’ll have to wait two years until the next edition. See you soon Yamagata!

Today, October 14th the awards for this year festival were announced: 
The Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize (The Grand Prize):

Horse Money Dir: Pedro Costa

The Mayor’s Prize:
The Pearl Button Dir: Patricio Guzmán

Awards of Excellence:
Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) Dir: Abbas Fahdel

Silvered Water, Syria Self-portrait Dir: Ossama Mohammed, Wiam Simav Bedirxan

Special Prize: 
Us women . Them women Dir: Julia Pesce

New Asian Currents Awards

Ogawa Shinsuke Prize:
Standing Men Dir: Maya Abdul-Malak

Awards of Excellence:
Snakeskin Dir: Daniel Hui

Each Story Dir: Okuma Katsuya

Special Mention:
Glittering Hands Dir: Lee-Kil Bora

A Report about Mina Dir: Kaveh Mazaheri

ARAGANE Dir: Oda Kaori

I Am Yet to See Delhi Dir: Humaira Bilkis

Citizens’ Prizes
Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) Dir: Abbas Fahdel

Directors Guild of Japan Award

My No-Mercy Home Dir: Aori

 

Yamagata Doc Film Fest, report – day 2

  
Here I am after my second day in Yamagata, a less intense one compared to yesterday, but nonetheless an eventful day (Oct 11th). 

My day kicked off in the motning with 2 shorts by Luis Ospina, shot in collaboration with Carlos Mayolo, Listen, Look (1972) his debut and The Vampires of Poverty (1978), it is the last  one that impressed me more. Partly parody, party documentary and partly mockumentary, the movie satirises a certain way of making cinema and TV that exploits the poor, a tendency to use the less fortunate to prove a pre-established political or social theory. Very creative in the way it’s constructed, Ospina mixes color and B&W photography, funny, improvised, but also scripted in some of its parts, overall it was a refreshing experience for me. The discovery continued with the afterscreening talk, when Ospina elaborated and explained a bit more about the movie, the so-called Cali group in Colombia and the concept of poverty porn, he also talked about how he was ostracised in Latin America by the Marxists and the left after the mivie was released.You can watch many of his movies (legally and for free) on his homepage, here. 

The afternoon started with a short (30′) from Myanmar, When the Boat Comes In by Khin Maung Kyaw, a depiction of a small fishermen village and its difficulties to survive, a situation that worsened when the government  decided to issue a one-month fishing ban. An interesting exploration of the daily life of the villagers and their unhappiness, had the documentary been longer, it would have probably beneficiated in term of quality and depth, hopefully the director will expand it into a longer version one day.
The third movie of the day was Trip Along Exodus by Hind Shoufani, the daughter of a famous politician and revolutionary Palestinian who after fighting for many years for the liberation of his land , decided toabandoned the scenes and live in Syria, far from his family and relatives.
The work is made as a diary-movie, the director talks with his father, asking him questions, in person or by phone, and trying to bridge the gab between the two, the man has been always more interesting in the revolutionary cause than in his family. It’s a “pretty” movie, in the sense that it uses some cute animation here and there to cheer up the somber tone of the film, and also the sense that is more a personal movie than a political one. 
The day ended with the weakest work of all, PYRAMID: Kaleidoscope Memories of Destruction by Sasakubo Shin, a wanna-be experimental documentary shot in 8mm, to which I couldn’t connect at all. The music was good but it seems to me more a sort of long music video than an attempt to create something more concrete. 

Like every day, from 10 o’clock at night, almost everybody went to Komian, a sort of nomiya where directors, film-lovers, journalists and whoever else meet, talk and drink until 2 or 3 in the morning, a very special place that makes Yamagata even more unique. 

 

Yamagata Doc Film Fest, report – day 1

From a rainy Yamagata, I wrote down some thoughts about yesterday, October 10th, my first day at this year festival. Good movies, some unexpected discoveries, lively discussions and as always, great atmosphere at Komiya, the place where almost everybody meets & drinks at night.

My day started with a surprisingly good documentary, France Is Our Mother Country (2015), from Rithy Panh, the French-Cambodian filmmaker author of The Missing Picture and s21, works that focus on the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. France Is Our Mother is an archive documentary entirely made of footage from the former French colony of Indochina, but Panh uses these images in a creative and even ironic way, when not sarcastic, to express all the sense of superiority of the colonizers (France) towards the colonized. Without a single spoken word but rich in music, now minimalist, now almost noise-like, and with the use of ironic but thought-provoking intertitles, the movie reaches almost an hypnotic quality. After few minutes in it we already start to realise how the film is a history in images, but also and at the same time a history of images, besides the obvious but tragic elements of oppression shown, what slowly sneaks into the viewers’ mind is a sense that basically everything can be demonstrated with images, after all wasn’t the footage shot by the colonizers themselves? At a certain point, this is my personal and extreme experience of it, I even started to doubt about the “reality” of the images, “couldn’t some of them just be fake?” I asked myself. The answer is: of course not, but this reaction made me realised how deceptive and open to interpretations images can be, and this is for me the best quality of France Is Our Mother Country.
The second movie of the day was Millets Back Home (2013) by the Taiwanese Sayun Simung, a documentary about the small Tayal ethnic minority living in a mountain village in Taiwan, a tribe to which the young director herself belong to. A very interesting work for its topic – how to transmit and keep alive minor languages, traditions and customs in our present world- but less for its style, too journalistic and straightforward, at least for my taste. Better was the talk after the screening when a member of the Tayal went onstage and sang a traditional chant.

The first movie in the afternoon was the highly anticipated The Pearl Button by Patricio Guzmán, a film that deserves all the praised it earned around the world. It stretches from the very distant – in time and space, the stars and the universe – to the very small of a button found at the bottom of the ocean. From the purity of a quartz and the almost celestial lightness of the sky and the water, to the gravity of death, torture and human beings smashed in the cogs of History (the Chilean dictatorship).
The 4th documentary of the day was Under the Cherry Tree (2015) by Tanaka Kei, a young Japanese director who followed the lives and struggles of 4 elderly people in a public housing complex in Kawasaki. Shot in low-tech and very simple in its style, no narration but intertitles to explain the background of these people and their problems, nonetheless Tanaka is very good at conveying through her camera the loneliness, the feeling of approaching death and the dreariness of their lives.
The last one of the day wasn’t a novelty for me, I had watched Aragane (2015) by Oda Kaori a couple of months ago on a screener, but seeing it on the big screen and with the proper sound system just confirmed the quality of the movie and the boldness of Oda in making an experimental work in form of documentary. Shot in a mine in Sarajevo, Aragane is composed of long takes mainly in the underground darkness, the real protagonists of the movie are the machinery, the flashing lights and a ceaseless noise enveloping the images. Hypnotic in the way Oda conveys the materiality of time and the sense of duration, Aragane reminded me, with due distinctions, of some works made by Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, I’m thinking especially of The Iron Ministry and Manakamana.

That’s all for the first day in Yamagata, tomorrow or maybe after tomorrow for the next reports.

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2015 – Perspectives Japan and Latinoamérica

This year Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival is kicking off today Oct 8th in the Japanese city, and promises an intense and full week of non-fiction cinema and all its forms, a must for everyone interested in documentary.
This is the second post I dedicated to this year event and its line-up. While in the first one I wrote about Competition and New Asian Currents (you can read it here), today I’d like to take a look at Perspectives Japan, a selection of new Japanese docs, and Latinoamérica—The Time and the People: Memories, Passion, Work and Life, a retrospective on the so called Third Cinema (Tercer Cine) and its resonances with the contemporary non-fiction production in Latin America.

Perspective Japan, as stated on the official page, will introduce “Five dynamic films that defy convention (…) in a display of the powerful contemplation and fresh vibrancy being explored in Japanese documentary filmmaking.”
Of the 5, the only one I had the chance to see is THE COCKPIT, a relatively short documentary (just a bit more than an hour) about a group of hip-hop musicians working on a new song. A static and almost hypnotic work, especially in its first part where the camera in a fixed position is showing us the rapper OMSB at work on his mixing console chatting to his mates. The Cockpit is a nice piece of non-fiction cinema, minimalistic in its approach, but interesting and watchable not only for wannabe-musicians. Okinawa: The Afterburn, directed by John Junkerman – an American who has lived in Japan for almost 40 years (and for a certain period in Okinawa itself) – is a deep look at the recent history of the islands, always a crucial geopolitical space to understand Japan and its tensions and relationship with the outside. Completing the line-up for Perspective Japan: PYRAMID: Kaleidoscope Memories of Destruction (Sasakubo Shin), Under the Cherry Tree (Tanaka Kei) and Voyage (Ikeda Sho).

As for the Latinoamérica section, it’s going to be an incredible journey at the heart of what was happening – social and political changes, resistance, upheavals, revolutions, massacres -during the 60s and 70s in Central and South America. Milestones of word documentary such as Patricio Guzmán‘s The Battle of Chile 1,2 and 3 will be screened alongside works of Luis Ospina and a mini-retrospective of short chilean documentaries, including films from Raúl Ruiz (The Suitcase, 1963) and Joris Ivens (. . . A Valparaiso, 1963, with commentary written by Chris Marker), almost 30 works in total, a visual feast not to be missed.

As written before, I’ll be there for 3 days (Oct 10th to 12th), if time permits, I’ll be posting, or more likely twitting, about it. Stay tuned.

God Speed You! Black Emperor and other works by Yanagimachi Mitsuo released (again) on DVD

  

God Speed You! Black Emperor (ゴッド スピード ユー! Black Emperor) is 16mm black & white documentary  by Yanagimachi Mitsuo about a group of Japanese bikers, “The Black Emperors”, part of the so-called bōsōzoku movement, the motorcycling subculture that arose during the 70s in Japan. In the following years the film became a cult movie, inspiring even a Canadian rock band that took its name from it. Now, the good news is that from September 2nd the film is again available on DVD, although only in Japan and, as far as I know, without English subtitles. If you live in Japan you can also rent the same edition, try at your local Tsutaya or Geo. 
God Speed You! Black Emperor was the feature debut for Yanagimachi Mitsuo, shot after establishing his own production company, Gunro Films, 2 years before. Yanagimachi, who is known internationally also for Himatsuri (火まつり, 1985), is a director whose production during his 40 years career has been sparse to say the least, his last movie to date is Who’s Camus Anyway? (カミュなんて知らない, 2005), released exactly 10 years ago. 

  
Together with God Speed You! Black Emperor the home video company Dimension (DIG) has also released other films by Yanagimachi, A 19-Year-Old’s Map (十九歳の地図, 1979), Farewell to the Land (さらば愛しき大地, 1982) and About Love, Tokyo (愛について 東京, 1992) all 3 works of fiction. A very intriguing work for me is The Wandering Peddlers (旅するパオジャンフー, 1995) his only other documentary,  it premiered at the Venice Film Fest in 1995 and had never been released on home video before. I haven’t seen it, but according to Variety, Yanagimachi “and his crew went to Taiwan where they filmed, in loose cinema verité style a number of medicine peddlers, who still travel the country selling their wares and entertaining small-town audiences. Resulting pic blurs the line between documentary and fiction as Yanagimachi explores the lives of a couple of groups of peddlers, and they appear to act out their personal dramas for the camera”. The cinematographer being Tamura Masaki just adds more interest to the film. 

  

As for the releases, as far as we know from the description, the DVDs are bare-bone editions without special features, the only extra material listed is a recent interview with Yanagimachi himself that is included in each DVD. One day it would be nice to see an edition of God Speed You! Black Emperor with English subtitles and lots of extras; putting the movie in its sociopolitical context and drawing connections with other works of the period would indeed benefit and deepen our viewing experience of it. 

Links: 

God Speed You! Black Emperor on DVD

Farewell to the Land on DVD

A 19-Year-Old’s Map on DVD

About Love, Tokyo on DVD

The Wandering Peddlers on DVD

Dissenting Japan – A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture 

Just a quick post to draw your attention on a significant book that the London-based Hurst will publish next September. The volume is titled Dissenting Japan – A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture and is written by the Tokyo-based writer and translator William Andrews, who by the way runs an excellent blog on the same topic here. 

 

Here’s the description from the publisher’s homepage: 

Following the March 2011 Tsunami and Fukushima nuclear crisis, the media remarked with surprise on how thousands of demonstrators had flocked to the streets of Tokyo. But mass protest movements are nothing new in Japan. The post-war period experienced years of unrest and violence on both sides of the political spectrum: from demos to riots, strikes, campus occupations, factional infighting, assassinations and even international terrorism.
This is the first comprehensive history in English of political radicalism and counterculture in Japan, as well as of the artistic developments during this turbulent time. It chronicles the major events and movements from 1945 to the new flowering of protests and civil dissent in the wake of Fukushima. Introducing readers to often ignored aspects of Japanese society, it explores the fascinating ideologies and personalities on the Right and the Left, including the student movement, militant groups and communes. While some elements parallel developments in Europe and America, much of Japan’s radical recent past (and present) is unique and offers valuable lessons for understanding the context to the new waves of anti-government protests the nation is currently witnessing.

Who’s is familiar with documentary cinema (and cinema in general) knows very well that radicalism, dissenting, resistance and counterculture are a very important part of the vocabulary that defines the post war Japanese non-fiction landscape, and the fiction as well, especially during the 60s and 70s. Ogawa Production and Sanrizuka, Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Minamata, NDU and Okinawa and the borders, but also Kamei Fumio and his Sunagawa Trilogy, maybe the first Japanese works to fully embody this “philosophy” of resistance and struggle on film (excluding the Prokino before the war of course). 

For all these reasons, Dissenting Japan will probably be (I haven’t read it yet) a very important read not only for historians but also for film scholars interested in Japanese cinema and in documentary in general. I’ll certainly write more about it when the book is out. 

Kuroki Kazuo, two works available for free at the Science Film Museum website

In postwar Japan, industrial films, PR movies, science films and educational movies formed an important space where filmmakers and production companies were allowed a certain degree of freedom and experimentation.

It’s a bless that such an important and massive output is now available to watch online at the Science Film Museum – free science movies resurrected from the Shōwa Era, a visual archive for researchers interested in non-fiction and films produced outside the entertainment sphere.

Although the works subtitled in English are really few, it is indeed an archive worth-checking and the reasons are well explained on their homepage:

The science films such as “THE WORLD OF MICROBES”, filmed using special camera techniques that gave the world it’s first film footage of the world under a microscope received many major awards in domestic and international scientific film festivals A true photographic legacy. From an academic perspective, these films will prove to be effective educational materials for the present and for the future.

However, with the existence of these films known only by a few, they lie dormant within companies that undertook the projects and the storerooms of production companies. Furthermore, as these films were produced in the analog era, the degree of deterioration is severe and their maintenance is proving extremely difficult.

Consequently, we established “The Science Film Museum (Incorporated NPO)” to make practical use of those science films in educational and research facilities by converting them to the high quality digitalisation (HD) from the original 35mm negatives through telecine transfer. And we present them through the website, also so that many people can experience the wonders of the mysteries of life.

What I’d like to focus on today are two movies made in the 1960s by one of my favourite Japanese filmmakers of the era, Kuroki Kazuo, a director who before establishing himself as an author somehow associated with the new wave (Silence Has No Wing, Ryōma Assassination among others) was a respected non-fiction filmmaker. On The Science Film Museum webpage it’s possible to watch the PR movie The Solar Thread (太陽の糸) commissioned by the ryon campany Torey, and the more known Record of a Marathon Runner(あるマラソンランナーの記録), shot in 1964, the year of Tokyo Olympics, a defining event for Japan that symbolically ushered the country in the elite of Western and modernized nations.

Even if you don’t understand Japanese, the first minutes of The Solar Thread – co-directed with another big name in Japanese cinema and documentary, Higashi Yōichi – are quintessential sixties: disorienting music, vivid colours palette, free-style editing and a taste for the abstract and the experimental that was still alive in the Japanese documentary scene of the time. Here the movie:

http://www.kagakueizo.org/movie/industrial/72/

As for Record of a Marathon Runner, there are various articles dealing with it online, I would recommend at least this long interview with Kuroki. Record of a Marathon Runner represents, for different reasons (subject tackled, overall tone, and music used), the negative, the other side, of the Olympics official discourse that was pushed by the mainstream media at the time:

http://www.kagakueizo.org/create/tokyo-sinema/79/

Motohachi Seiichi’s new documentary『アラヤシキの住人たち』

  

Motohachi Seiichi is a photographer and documentary filmmaker whose works and activity and I’m referring here especially to his achievements in non-fiction, although presented at international film festivals, have not yet reached the audience and the recognition they deserved, in my opinion of course. 

  

He’s the author of, among others,  Nadja’s Village and Alexei and the Spring, works screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, but also the producer of other interesting documentaries such as A Village That Changed Into Water (Onishi Nobuo, 2007) or Tale of a Butcher Shop (2013), the latter listed last year by Kinema Junpo in its annual best bunka eiga section. 

  

His new documentary, 『アラヤシキの住人たち』(Arayashiki no jūnintachi)  will open in some selected cinemas in Japan on May 1st and was shot during a year at the Kyodo Gakusha farm, a cooperative community which hosts people from a variety of backgrounds such as mentally disadvantaged persons or who are tired of the city life. Raising animals, growing vegetables and making cheese with ecological and organic methods, staying in this community means for its people also exploring a different style of living. It seems a documentary worth mentioning and following for a series of reasons, the topic of course but also the style adopted, at least from what we can glimpse from the trailer, is a move “back” when documentary in Japan meant to be first of all a visual work and the filmmaker cared about framing, light, editing etc. and wasn’t just a branch or a development of video journalism…..