This is the second dispatch from this year Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions. Your can reda the first one here.
Founded in 2009, this year’s edition of the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions is dedicated to exploring the possibilities and problems posed by the changing nature of moving images in our time. Titled Docs: Images and Records, the event, currently taking place at the Tokyo Photography Art Museum, features a variety of works (films, installations, photography, performances and talks) that reflect on the meaning of representation through the visual medium and, in particular, question the meaning of the word ‘documentary’, a term that has become increasingly ossified (both on the big and small screen) and synonymous with the word ‘factual’. Or, as stated on the web page of the festival:
A document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts.
The Lumière brothers’ Exiting the Factory (1895), which is a record of people leaving a factory, is widely recognized as the starting point of the history of motion pictures. People at the time were astonished to see scenes from their everyday lives being recorded and replayed before their eyes as if the events were actually happening right there. Today, 130 years after the invention of moving images, it is entirely unexceptional for people to record and share their daily lives through photographs and videos. Meanwhile, the definition of a photograph has been expanded to include digital images and that of moving images now encompasses digital video; in digital form, these media can be manipulated more freely than before, resulting in a more complex and ambiguous relationship between facts and the images that represent them. Held on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 will focus on the transformation of these media. By examining a wide range of works through the lens of images and words, the festival will pursue a reconsideration of documents and documentary.
I was able to attend a couple of screenings last week, a special dedicated to discovering Japanese television documentaries and independent works that inhabit documentary and experimental cinema called Japanese Post-Documentary, and two of the four Commission Projects created specifically for this year’s event.
Japanese Post-Documentary Special 3: Nihon University Film Study Club Special brings together four short films made by a collective of students at the famous university; according to what was explained in the presentation, the versions screened at the event are digital restorations of the films based on footage from the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum Collection.
Conversation between Nail and Sock (釘と靴下の対話,1958), by Hirano Katsumi and Hiroh Koh, was perhaps the best of the bunch, a surrealist dream set at the university, heavily influenced by Bunuel and with stylistic choices reminiscent of Bresson, while Record N (Nの記録, Kanbara Hiroshi and Motoharu Jōnouchi, 1959) is a short film documenting the immediate aftermath of the Isewan Typhoon (Typhoon Vera), a disaster that struck the central part of the archipelago in September 1959, killing more than 5,000 people and displacing thousands more. Similar in its immediacy to the documentaries produced in the immediate aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, it differs profoundly from them in that many of its images show bodies swept away by floodwaters or trapped in collapsed houses, and in that it is accompanied by light and pop music, choices that make it, in parts, exploitative and perhaps unethical. However, as scholar and researcher Hirasawa Gō pointed out in the talk following the screening, images of such disasters were not easily accessible at the time – this was the late 1950s, an era when television was not yet popular in every household – and so the very raw footage, and the fact that it was screened at the university, was both an act of documentation and witnessing, and a protest that went against the grain of social norms.
Pu Pu (1960) is definitely the most surrealist of the four films showcased at the festival, and was made within the club in response to and in support of the protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty that took place and shook the country in 1960. Following these uprisings, it was decided to reorganise the Nihon University Film Study Club into the New Film Study Club, and as a result the VAN Lab for Film Science was founded. Bowl (椀, 1961), perhaps the best known of the four shorts, was one of the first results of this shift, a work I couldn’t really relate to – I found the first part almost unbearable, while the second was more aesthetically accomplished – but which undoubtedly has a raw energy and anger about it, and which also marks the directorial debut of Adachi Masao.
This is the first report from this year Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions
Founded in 2009, this year’s edition of the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions is dedicated to exploring the possibilities and problems posed by the changing nature of moving images in our time. Titled Docs: Images and Records, the event, currently taking place at the Tokyo Photography Art Museum, features a variety of works (films, installations, photography, performances and talks) that reflect on the meaning of representation through the visual medium and, in particular, question the meaning of the word ‘documentary’, a term that has become increasingly ossified (both on the big and small screen) and synonymous with the word ‘factual’. Or, as stated on the web page of the festival:
A document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts.
The Lumière brothers’ Exiting the Factory (1895), which is a record of people leaving a factory, is widely recognized as the starting point of the history of motion pictures. People at the time were astonished to see scenes from their everyday lives being recorded and replayed before their eyes as if the events were actually happening right there. Today, 130 years after the invention of moving images, it is entirely unexceptional for people to record and share their daily lives through photographs and videos. Meanwhile, the definition of a photograph has been expanded to include digital images and that of moving images now encompasses digital video; in digital form, these media can be manipulated more freely than before, resulting in a more complex and ambiguous relationship between facts and the images that represent them. Held on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 will focus on the transformation of these media. By examining a wide range of works through the lens of images and words, the festival will pursue a reconsideration of documents and documentary.
I was able to attend a couple of screenings last week, a special dedicated to discovering Japanese television documentaries and independent works that inhabit documentary and experimental cinema called Japanese Post-Documentary, and two of the four Commission Projects created specifically for this year’s event.
Japanese Post-Documentay Special 2: “I Want to Go Far Away” brings together four episodes of the popular TV programme Tooku e ikitai (literally, I want to go far away), produced by TV Man Union and Yomiuri Telecasting Corporation between 1970 and 1974, a period when the small screen in Japan offered artistic freedom and space for experimentation. It is worth noting that it was in this milieu that Sasaki Shōichirō produced some stunning works such as Dream Island Girl (1974) or Four Seasons: Utopiano (1980), films for television that influenced a generation of filmmakers, including Kore’eda Hirokazu, who speaks highly of him in his book of memoirs.
Rokusuke sasurai no tabi Iwatesan uta to chichi to (六輔さすらいの旅・岩手山・歌と乳と, 1970, Konno Tsutomu) is a journey to Iwate Prefecture led by Ei Rokusuke, a musician, essayist and television personality. Mōhitotsu no tabi`- Yamashita Kiyoshi-ga bunshū yori (もう一つの旅「山下清画文集」より, Tanikawa Shuntarō, 1971), the host here is Itami Jūzō, who was a famous actor before he became a director (Tampopo, A Taxing Woman) He follows in the footsteps of the artist Yamashita Kiyoshi, famous for his chigiri-e works and his wanderings around Japan. Both works echo the trend of programmes dedicated to the discovery of the Japanese countryside that were so popular on television at the time, but deconstruct them through the use of irony and comic sketches.
I had seen it before, but it was nice to revisit Ore no Shimokita (おれの下北, 1972) a 26-minute programme (like all the others) directed by and starring Imamura Shōhei, who travels to the Shimokita Peninsula in Aomori Prefecture to pay homage to his mentor, director Kawashima Yūzō, who was born in the area. As with the other two episodes, there are also some funny bits, such as Imamura stopping his journey to visit a snack bar or relax in a hot spring. The 1970s, especially the first and middle part, was a decade in which Imamura, like other filmmakers of his generation, was not very active in cinema, after the collapse of the big studios in the early 1970s, but devoted himself to making documentaries for the small screen (Following the Unreturned Soldiers: Malaysia, Karayuki-san,etc.). The almost meta approach to documentary and the use of his own persona in front of the camera was not new to the Japanese director, who in 1967 made one of the most famous works bridging and questioning non-fiction and fiction cinema, A Man Vanishes.
The last episode was the rarest and by far the wildest of the four: Fuji Tatsuya no wan uei chiketto – Yokohama, Hayama, Tsuruga (藤竜也のワン・ウェイ・チケット-横浜・葉山・敦賀, Sato Teru, 1974). Director Satō Teru uses Fuji Tatsuya’s life (born in Beijing, and raised in Tsuruga and Yokohama) to compose a surrealistic collage of images of the famous actor travelling around the places where he grew up: ipercinetic, flashy, colourful and mixing different styles, this is a joyful experiment similar to the works produced by ATG Theatre at the time, and was never broadcast on television because of its boldness.
This is the translation of an article I origianally wrote in Italian about three years ago, on the occasion of the special online edition of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.
Anticipating many of the aesthetic trends that now abound in the visual and social media landscape, The New God is constructed as a video diary that explores and reveals what lies behind the attraction of some young Japanese for the far-right movements at the end of the last century. Video activist and filmmaker Tsuchiya Yutaka films his interactions with ultra-nationalist singer Karin Amamiya and other members of the far-right group to which she belongs. Although his political orientation is completely different, Tsuchiya is so fascinated by what the girl has to say that he decides to give her a video camera to record her daily reflections.
The documentary begins with Amamiya in front of the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where soldiers and high-ranking generals who committed Class A war crimes during the Second World War are enshrined. A place that continues to cause controversy and tension between Japan and the international community, especially South Korea and China, due to the annual visits to the place by important Japanese political figures. As director Tsuchiya, a left-wing activist and fierce opponent of the imperial system, begins to film Amamiya and her band, he discovers that behind the hard veneer of right-wing extremism lies a sense of almost existential confusion not unlike that experienced by other young people in Japan at the time. The New God thus proves to be a fascinating portrait of a group of very confused young people who have made far-right ideology and the celebration of the emperor the centre of their lives.
Structured as a kind of low-fi video confessional and visual dialogue, shot alternately by Amamiya and Tsuchiya, the documentary is an exploration of the response to life malaise by a group of young people in search of something to fill their existential void. In this sense, one of the most striking elements of the work is the sincerity with which the young singer reveals her feelings to the camera. In her own words and by her own admission, the political stance is often just a mask, a personal reaction to a sense of not belonging in contemporary Japanese society. Amamiya often talks about the lack of meaning that reality has for her, especially when compared to the life-and-death decisions made by soldiers during the Second World War. Of course, this is her rather superficial, confused and mythical vision of Japan’s wartime and supposedly heroic past.
In her confessions and conversations with Tsuchiya and Itō, the band’s guitarist, the girl is looking for something to hold on to, something solid and stable that can give meaning to her everyday reality. Very often this meaning and centre of gravity is provided by the pride of belonging to the “Japanese ethnic group”, which she believes to be a real concept. One of the most fascinating parts of The New God is Amamiya and Itō’s trip to North Korea. There they meet some members of the Yodogō group of the Red Army Faction (Sekigun-ha), who hijacked a JAL flight to Tokyo on 31 March 1970 and eventually took refuge in North Korea, where they were still living when the film was shot. Amamiya, who is very distant from the group in ideology and politics, feels a certain envy both for these 60-year-old ex-terrorists and for the sense of ethnic unity she sees in the Asian country. In one of her videos, she confesses that children aren’t bullied here as they are in Japan, and that she was bullied by her classmates several times as a child and young girl.
As the film progresses, Amamiya’s weaknesses and feelings are slowly revealed, and she is not afraid to confess her fears and indecision directly to the camera. Through the videos that Tsuchiya and Amamiya exchange, the mutual attraction that the two are beginning to feel for each other comes to the surface at a certain point; the two will eventually marry after the filming is finished. It is this sense of progressive revelation and self-discovery accomplished with the help of the camera that makes this documentary such an interesting experiment. The New God thus sits at the crossroads of video activism – Tsuchiya’s own What Do You Think About the War Responsibility of Emperor Hirohito? (1997) is, in a sense, the starting point for The New God – and the tradition of Japanese personal cinema (self-documentary)1.
Seen today, more than 25 years after it was released, The New God is an interesting example of the problematic process of liberation and democratisation of the filming subject made possible by the technological revolution and brought about by the affordability of small video cameras. At the same time, the video message style with which the work is constructed anticipates today’s ubiquitous visual social media aesthetics. There is a great deal of exhibitionism behind Amamiya’s video letters and video confessions, more in the way she relates to the eye of the camera than in what she actually says to it. It is no coincidence that the film ends with her saying, before turning off the video: “I can’t live my life without a camera!”.
That is, the personal, diaristic, often amateur documentary, whose pioneers include Hara Kazuo’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song, 1974 (1974) and Suzuki Shirōyasu’s Impressions of a Sunset (1975). ↩︎
Underground spaces accumulate traces and memories of past presences, both non-human ones created over thousands of years by geological processes, and those left by human activity and histories. Over the past three years, Japanese artist and filmmaker Oda Kaori has explored and focused her attention on some of these underground places in Japan, seeking to capture and evoke past existences through images and sounds. The result of this research, which has also led to other productions in various media, is アンダーグラウンド Underground (2024), a sonic and visual experiment that was presented at the 37th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival in the Nippon Cinema Now section last November.
At least three years in the making, Underground is her most experimental work to date, and a project that concludes a phase of Oda’s career dedicated to exploring subterranean spaces with Aragane (2015) and continued with the underwater world with Cenote (2019), but one that may also herald a new path, more experimental, for the artist. If you want to know more about Oda and her previous work, I’ve written a long essay about her first three works, or there’s also an interview I did with her – although it was almost ten years ago, at the beginning of her career.
The interest in the Japanese underground and in the past lives it evokes is thus a continuation of the path that the artist took with Aragane and Cenote, but here with a focus on the subterranean spaces of the archipelago. An early result of this exploration of Japan’s underground spaces was released last year, Gama (2023), a medium-length film that brings to light, almost literally, the stories of forced mass suicides of Okinawan people in gamas (natural caves), during the latter stages of the Pacific War. Much of the footage shot for Gama was reused in Underground and combined with images from another project, a nearly ten-minute installation created for the city of Sapporo in 2022. To complete Underground, Oda combined all this material with others shot in Yubari, Shimane, Saga, and Hyogo, although the locations are never specified in the film.
The biggest departure and difference from her previous works is Oda’s decision to use Yoshigai Nao as “shadow” in the film, an almost phantasmatic presence that moves freely throughout the work, connecting different places and different times, and the meaning of which is never explained. This addition brings a performative element to Underground that is almost absent from her other films. Yoshigai is a coreographer, dancer, and director herself, and has made some interesting works such as Grand Bouquet (2019) and Shari (2021); まさゆめ Masayume (2024), her latest – which I have unfortunately not seen – was produced as Cenote by the Aichi Arts Center and screened in Nagoya last November. Yoshigai also has a prominent role in Gama, as most of the images from the hybrid documentary released in 2023 are reused in Underground. This is probably the main problem I have with Oda’s latest film, the central part is a repetition of what was done and shown in Gama, and although I know that it is the other way round – Gama came out of the Underground project and not vice versa – I feel that the images of Okinawa could have been left out.
While Underground is perhaps less effective when it combines material that is too visually disparate – at least for me the film does not work when it weaves together Yoshigai’s performance with the more abstract images shot underground – it excels in the more visually and sonically experimental moments. In the director’s own words “the underground world is pitch black, and nothing can be seen unless light is shone on it. It is not reflected. The act of shining light on the darkness felt like an act of sculpting the space with light”. This play of light and darkness, the overlapping of the artificial and the natural – the use of film superimposition is first class – and the materiality of the images, which I understand were shot on film, find a magnificent parallel in the sound, a sonic tapestry that, in the most inspired moments, manages to elevate the whole film.
If I’m not mistaken, at the moment Oda is working on smaller projects, she will be screening one of her shorter works, shot digitally, about her mother, at the next Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions between next February and March.
A recent rewatch of 三里塚 辺田部落 Sanrizuka – Heta Village prompted me to reflect on, and reconsider two of the most significant scenes in the documentary. I’m referring to the short one with the snake crawling through the grass and Ogawa reflecting on the changing situation in the village, and the one, much longer, when the two young men from Heta are taken by plain-clothes police officers. It goes without saying that everything I’m writing here is built upon, and would not be possible without, the writings of Markus Nornes; his volume on Ogawa Production was the starting point of this site, and what kindled my interest in the collective.
I’ve uploaded both scenes on YouTube, hopefully they will not be taken down.
The snake here is seen as a symbol of transformation and rebirth, Ogawa himself is commenting that, I’m paraphrasing, the resistance and battles in Sanrizuka caused the reappearance and the strengthening of old folklore practices and rites, but also the creation of new collective practices, such as the Women Alliance, and the Youth Alliance. He repeatedly mentions the concept of kō (講); following Joan Mellen “at the base of their movement is the revitalization of the concept of the kō, or group meeting, a theme that lies at the heart of Heta Village. The kō began as a Buddhist prayer meeting and later developed many forms, including that of the town meeting. (…) The kō is a historical means among Japanese peasants of uniting people horizontally, rather than vertically by rank. Ogawa shows how this ancient communal tradition provides the backbone to the Sanrizuka movement, sustaining it by drawing on established, familiar, and revered patterns of social organization” (Mellen, 1976)
I’ve always found this section, part of a longer take, beautiful and revealing: two young men from the village are taken away by the police. The camera stops, a group of farmers keep following the cars, sometimes kicking them. The wind blows through the rice fields. The camera now gently pans 180 degrees towards two ladies talking, one of them is the mother of one of the boys taken away, and grandpa Tonojita, one of the central figures in Heta and the protagonist of the awe-inspiring long opening scene, praises her son. As the long take continues, the camera slowly pans back to the cars moving, we see them going out of the frame in distance, while the drum cans signal their passage. The almost-tribal beating sound and the accompanying voice shouting, through a megaphone, what the police is doing to the village, are also perceived far away and fading.
I read this long passage as a cartography of sorts of what was happening in Heta village at the time: the hamlet, shaken by recent events (the death of young Sannomiya, and the police spreading division and discord among the farmers), was looking within itself to find a new balance and unity to overcome the crisis. I also read this part of the long take as an embodiment of two of the more significant lines of flight traversing the film: a sense of distance from the action and the battles, but at the same time an extreme proximity to the core of the struggle and its motivations, achieved by turning the gaze towards the lives and histories of the villagers.
Completed only in 2001, although the preliminary works for its construction started 30 years prior (in 1971), the Okumiomote Dam is one of the many mammoth projects built in Japan in the latter part of the 20th century in order to satiate the country’s growing thirst for energy; the other side of the Japanese post war economic miracle. Constructed also to prevent flooding in the Miwa water reservoir, the main purpose of the dam remains to generate hydroelectric power, a type of energy considered, and rightly so, “green”. However, as a “side effect”, the construction of dams often ends up reshaping the geographical and social landscape of the area where they are built, destroying villages, displacing people, and erasing the cultural and historical heritage of the area.
There are several documentaries that explore how the construction of a dam impacts and alters the lives of people and their histories, from Before the Flood by Li Yifan and Yu Yan in 2005, about the colossal Three Gorges Dam in China, to Mizu ni natta mura (2007) by photographer and director Ōnishi Nobuo on the Tokuyama Dam in Gifu prefecture. Last August I had the chance to attend a screening of Echigo Okumiomote: A Traditional Mountain Village (越後奥三面 山に生かされた日々) at the newly established Kinema Neu in Nagoya. Side note, this is a mini-theater born from the ashes of the Nagoya Cinematheque, a cinema that, in turn, arised from the jishu jōei undō (自主上映運動), the independent screenings organised throughout Japan during the 1970s and 1980s, in this specific case to show Ogawa Production’s documentaries.
Echigo Okumiomote is a documentary directed by Himeda Tadayoshi (1928-2013), a film director and visual folklorist who, in 1976, established the Center for Ethnological Visual Documentation, an organization that has produced almost 300 works, both films and videos, exploring and capturing the varied folk culture of the archipelago. Originally released in Japan in September 1984, Echigo Okumiomote was recently restored in 4K. This was my second time watching it, I took part in the crowdfunding project to restore it organised last year (2023), and so I received a temporary digital screener as a perk.
Shot in four years, between 1980 and 1984, after Himeda visited the village for the first time in the spring of 1979, the movie follows the everyday life of the people of Okumiomote, an isolated mountain village in Niigata prefecture, located near the border with Yamagata prefecture. The village, its inhabitants, the mountains, the forest and the rivers, all together form a fascinating ecosystem and microcosm of a life dependent upon and regulated by the interaction of natural and human elements, where the former are predominant. This lifestyle and the specific traditions, customs, and habits practiced—changed and improved for centuries by the people—would eventually disappear as a result of the construction of the dam: the village and the surrounding area would be completely submerged. The villagers were relocated to a nearby place, this was the subject of Himeda’s Echigo Okumiomote dai ni-bu furusato wa kieta ka (1996) a documentary that follows the villagers from 1984 to 1995, a film that unfortunately I have have not seen.
While, as we learn in the first minutes of the film, there had been an anti-dam movement active since 1971, the entirety of the documentary depicts and focuses on various jobs done in the mountains and in the fields by the villagers, such as hunting, plant gathering, and harvesting, and on the rituals practiced in the hamlet. Only the last thirty minutes are a more direct reflection on the disappearance of the village, and on the act of documenting its existence, and thus preserving its memory on film. The work is narrated by Himeda himself—more like a commentary of what is happening on screen, a reflection on his and his staff experience, than a traditional narration— and his presence and that of the troupe are never hidden. Once we even see a special meeting, requested by Himeda himself, when the village’s hunters are strongly opposing the presence of the camera during an upcoming and very important bear-hunting trip. The theatrical viewing allowed me, ça va sans dire, to focus more, and the darkness of the teather made the colours stand out even more since the very beginning: the blue screen of the title, the white of the snowy landscape, and the greens of the woods in the first opening minutes, plunge the viewer in a world rich and abundant in colours and tonalities. It’s a didactical movie in a way, but, as written above, the narration by Himeda keeps everything very matter-of-fact. Moreover, while the pace is not fast, the film moves very quickly from one aspect of the village to the other. What slowly emerges on screen is the complex economics of the microcosms that is the village: gathering chestnuts, burning different patches of the land every three years to plant different grains, fishing, hunting bears and chamois, and gathering zenmai, a type of edible fern that, as we learned, provided half of the income for the town. This is one of the most fascinating sections of the film, families would usually go into the woods for a month, living in a shed, gathering, boiling and then drying the plants, everything onsite. There was even a school holiday in the area that allowed kids to go into the woods with their parents for about ten days. This and all the activities in the fields, mountains, and rivers captured on film signal a natural abundance, on the one hand, and a very harsh life dictated by the natural elements and the cycle of seasons for the people of the village, on the other. I think it is this contrast, together with the specificity of the practices developed in the area for centuries, that makes Echigo Okumiomote a unique and enriching viewing experience, especially seen now, 30 years after everything was filmed.
There is no doubt that by focusing mainly on ancient practices—more on this later—the documentary can be read as a slightly traditionalist work, that is, a film that glorifies the way of the past. While this take might be partly true, I think the images, the time spent by the crew with the people of the village, and the care with which Himeda and his group recorded and preserved aspects of a way of life about to disappear, make it nonetheless a compelling chapter in the history of Japanese documentary cinema.
An interesting statement by a responsible of the Center for Ethnological Visual Documentation, and, if I’m not mistaken, a member of the crew that was with Himeda in Niigata, posted online in August 2024, sheds light on the process behind the making of Echigo Okumiomote. According to his words, I’m paraphrasing, this is not a film that records the real life of the Okumiomote community in 1984, but a film that captured the various inherited customs before they were submerged under the dam. I think this statement could and should be read more as a stylistic choice than a reflection about what was going on at the time. Also it is worth adding that documentary is always a form of “fiction”, a construction that cannot reproduce or represent the totality of “life” or “lifestyle” of a certain area and a certain time. Documentary is not a point of view on the real, but a real point of view. In 1984 Japan was about to enter into its bubble economy phase, and lifestyle was changing even in rural areas. By focusing their camera on old and traditional practices still alive in the village, and not on the changes brought by modern life, Himeda and his crew stayed true to their ethnographic and folkloric approach. Not to the extent done in Oku-Aizu kijishi (奥会津の木地師, 1976), when the practice of building a temporary shed in the woods was basically exhumed and brought to life one more time for the camera, but nonetheless, it is a cinematic choice that functions as a philosophical foundation for the film.
The documentary pairs very well, in my opinion, with Haneda Sumiko’s Ode to Mt. Hayachine (早池峰の賦 ,1982), filmed almost during the same years in the mountains of Iwate prefecture, although their approach could not be more different. On the one hand, Himeda is interested, as we have seen, to preserve and document on film practices on the cusp of oblivion, on the other, Haneda, while documenting an ancient tradition (Kagura), seems to be more interested in the changes happening in the two towns and how ritual practices have evolved and are evolving in time.
Echigo Okumiomote was accompanied by a publication of a massive volume about the life of the village, an ethnographic study and document of the area that is as impressive as the film itself.
The second part of this ongoing series (first is here) is about words and the use, or the lack thereof, of certain terminology in Japanese cinema (studies). This is also the article I am less confident about, since it is, strictly speaking, about language, a field I am not an expert in. The following paragraphs are, thus, more a tentative search for words that might not even exist, than a proper analysis or definitive statement.
A necessary disclaimer: I am by no means advocating for a certain superiority of the English language (or French, Italian, etc.) over the Japanese, nor for a codification of a way to construct a documentary or a film that Japanese cinema should follow and adopt. My effort aspires more to be a survey of a situation that is open to external influences and thus in flux and evolving. I am also not advocating for a perfect correspondence and total translatability between languages, on the contrary, I am all for letting the specificities of geographical areas (not necessarily countries) and groups of people express themselves: different languages, dialects, political conditions and cultures give birth to different types of cinemas, and more broadly, to a diverse approach towards visual expression.
After all, in Japan this linguistic specificity goes back to the dawn of cinema and is still alive today: the galaxy of non-fiction films in Japanese has been rendered, throughout the years, with a variety of words such as ‘kiroku eiga (record film), the senden eiga (propaganda film), (…) the bunka eiga (culture film), and, finally, the dokyumentarii eiga‘ (Nornes 2003), and bunka eiga is still used today to categorize and award non-fiction films by the prestigious film magazine Kinema Junpo. It is interesting for the discussion to note how the term bunka eiga has a tendency to denote a certain type of non-fiction cinema that tackle historical and especially social themes, but without experimenting too much with the cinematic language.
While the absence of a terminology does not necessarily correspond to a lack of a certain mode of doing non-fiction cinema, what interests and fascinates me, is how the scarcity (yet to be proved) of certain documentary and experimental practices in the archipelago, is reflected in the lack of a terminology (again, yet to be proved), and how these two phenomena are related.
In search for words
As discussed in the previous entry, following the English literature on the subject, I have decided to use the terms archival film practices, found footage documentary and compilation documentary in the title. A constellation of expressions that, together with recycled cinema and collage film, better describes the field I’m here analyzing: a series of cinematic practices that employ found footage and archival images to create works of non-fiction, and visual essays.
That being said, the boundaries between what these practices are and what they are not, are often nebulous. As nebulous are the English terms used, a very shaky ground to build upon, but at least these expressions can function as a starting point. In Japanese, as far as I could gather from my inquiries, there is, again, a scarcity in the specific terminology, or at least, in the use of it .
The English term compilation documentary, for instance, appears not to have a corresponding Japanese translation. That is to say, it is rather rendered with sentences such as 映像素材を映画に編集した (edited the footage into a film), or 映像素材をコラージュした作品 (a work made of a collage of footage), and so on.
Recycled cinema and collage film are definitely two terms that point towards a practice more in tune with experimental filmmaking than documentary. While the former appears not to have a correspondent word in Japanese, the latter, コラージュ映画 collage film, or 映像コラージュ video collage, is a term that has been used in the archipelago for decades. It is probably so because the term collage came to film studies from and through the pictorial arts and the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century (Braque, Picasso). For instance, I found an essay written in 1998 for the Image Forum Festival by scholar Kitakōji Takashi about a program titled FAKE THE TIME dedicated to collage films—コラージュ映画 in the original title—shot on video or on 16mm by artist such as Johan Grimonprez, Jay Rosenblatt, or Martin Arnold.
As for the term found footage documentary, the situation is more muddled, since in Japan found footage horror is a subgenre, often overlapping with mockumentary, that enjoys great popularity (Noroi: the Curse, and in general the movies by Shiraishi Kōji). Searching ファウンドフッテージドキュメンタリー (found footage documentary) on the internet resulted in a plethora of horror movies and related papers, the only time I found ファウンドフッテージ used in a non-fiction context, was when the articles were translations of discussions in English.
Different is the case of アーカイヴァルドキュメンタリー or アーカイヴァル映画 (archival documentary or archival film), a term that seems to have gained currency in recent years, in concomitance with the so called “archival turn”. Especially when the writings are discussing the films of Sergei Loznitsa, an author whose works have been screened in Japanese cinemas on several occasions, and some of which are even available on streaming platforms. It is not far-fetched to say that probably the usage of the term started in Japan with the films of the Ukrainian author. So far, I have not found examples whereアーカイブヴァルドキュメンタリー is used to describe a film made in Japan, again my (re)search has not been deep, but I believe it to be indicative nonetheless.
In the next installment I will tackle some works made in Japan that fit the categories here discussed.
References:
Markus Nornes, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era Through Hiroshima, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
This is a first in a series of short articles dedicated to archival film practices in Japan, an umbrella term that points towards a constellation made of found footage documentaries, compilation documentary, recycle cinema, and collage films.
While the practice of making found footage and compilation documentaries out of archival material is and has been widespread in Europe and in the U.S. for quite some time—I’m guilty of knowing too little about the history of these films in other parts of the world—researching these cinematic practices in Japan resulted, for me, in a deafening silence and in a dead end. This and the following articles are an attempt to make sense and examine this scarcity, and an opportunity to focus on the few works made in Japan that can be included into these “categories”.
In 1947, French filmmaker Nicole Védrès made Paris 1900, a compilation film assembled from footage shot between 1900 and 1914, while in 1965 Gianfranco Baruchello and Alberto Grifi experimented with found footage images from Hollywood movies destined to be trashed in Uncertain Verification, and in 1987 in From the Pole to the Equator, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi reworked the colonialist gaze of material shot in 1925 into something very different. These are just some of the most significant examples of compilation film or found footage cinema from the last century. Moreover, in the past few decades the practice of recycle cinema, another term to add to the constellation, has seen a surge in production and quality, brought about by the technological advance and the availability of archival material, but also by a will to inquire the meaning of reassembling images from the past and its impact in the present. Filmmakers as diverse as Bill Morrison, Haroun Farocki, Jonas Mekas, and Sergej Loznitsa have all extensively explored the possibilities and challenged the limits of archival film practices, assembling insightful and boundary-pushing works.
What about the history of these film practices in Japan? To my knowledge and according to my brief research, in the archipelago this is a story of an absence, as it were, both in the documentary and in the experimental field. Considering that Japan has a long, rich, and heterogeneous history of documentary filmmaking and of experimental cinema, this came to me as a surprise, but also as a topic worth of further investigation. There are, naturally, exceptions—I will touch on them in the the following articles dedicated to the subject—and there are several documentaries made in Japan that use indeed archival images, especially those dealing with and depicting the Pacific War or the social revolts of the late 1960s. However, these type of works—The tetralogy of documentaries (2014-2024) directed by Daishima Haruhiko about the Sanrizuka struggle and the students movements, or Boy Soldiers: The Secret War in Okinawa (2018) by Mikami Chie and Ōya Hanayo come to mind—are usually made by combining interviews, reenactments, newly shot scenes, and narration, thus I’m not sure they can completely count as the type of practices discussed here. In addition, the archival material in these films is usually used more to demonstrate a point than to provoke a sensation or a reflection on the status of the images.
I’m aware that this is a very debatable definition and stance, someone might argue that those are indeed archival documentaries, but I tend to side with the definitions provided on the matter by some scholars, who identify archival film practices as acts of creating something novel and aesthetically complex and layered. Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, for instance, state that ‘In general terms, the expression [archival cinema] describes the operation of reuse, recycling and reappropriation of material shot in the past, which is recomposed to produce new film texts’ (2023), and according to Eric Thouvenel ‘found footage films are far more than the “documentation” of an era; their significance is not located at the level of the represented event, but with the events occurring within the representation itself.’ (2008) Moreover, when writing about Jay Leyda and his landmark volume on the subject, Bill Nichols points out that ‘the core idea of the compilation film revolves around not only montage and photomontage but also ostranenie, the basic tenet of Russian formalism as put forward by Victor Shklovsky: “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”’ (2014) Furthermore, I believe it is also a matter of the length and the quantity of the material used: the more archival images or found footage are utilised, the more the films approach an idea of recycle cinema that opens new meanings for the images assembled, ‘in such a way as to produce new knowledge about history that evokes a deeper, more sensual, and experiential understanding of the past.’ (Russell 2018)
As for the reasons of the scarcity of these practices in the archipelago, the first that comes to mind is the incredible difficulty in obtaining and using images from films from Japanese production companies. Anyone who has ever tried to organize events, or just use still images from movies for publications is, sadly, well aware of this madness, and even when the permission is granted, more often than not, big studios are asking very high prices. However, this cannot be the only reason, since there are alternatives, such as using found footage from home-movies or other non-commercial or amateur sources. In the the next articles, I will write about a couple of exceptions, works that can be described as belonging to the categories here discussed, and that make use of some of the aforementioned archival alternatives.
References:
Alberto Brodesco and Maurizio Cau, ed. Found footage. Il cinema, i media, l’archivio. Cinema e Storia. Rivista di studi interdisciplinari n. 2023, Rubettino, 2023.
Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film, Hill and Wang, 1971.
Bill Nichols, Remaking History: Jay Leyda and the Compilation Film, Film History Vol. 26, No. 4, Indiana University Press, 2014.
Catherine Russel, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Duke University Press, 2018.
Eric Thouvenel, How “Found Footage” Films Made Me Think Twice about Film History, in Cinéma & Cie, Milano University Press, 2008.
I’ve decided to publish here my essay on three films by Oda Kaori that was originally meant to be published in an international film magazine (things have stalled, unfortunately). I took the decision because in the meantime Oda’s career (the piece was written almost five years ago) has evolved significantly, with more exhibitions, art installations, political and social stances, and films (Gama, and the Underground project). It goes without saying that now I would write the piece quite differently, mainly in style but also regarding the content. Posting here this short essay does not preclude that in the future I might return to write on the subject; on the contrary, it gives me the chance and the peace of mind to turn the page and freshly reassess the filmography of one of the most fascinating artists working in Japan today.
Reassessing the human: three experimental documentaries by Oda Kaori
“The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.”[1]
A worker sits down and takes a break. In the deep belly of a mine and enveloped in a pitch black surrounding, he bites a red apple. His helmet lamp provides the only few blades of light in a scene of almost Vermeer-like beauty. In the preceding scenes the noise from the machinery at work in the mine is so unbearable that the words are oftentimes superfluous or just a waste of energy. The life in the mine is only silence or cacophony: there is no middle ground. It is an alien landscape, both visual and sonic, where the human is just one element among several. The beauty of the moment derives from the interplay between darkness and light, from the silence after the wall of noise that precedes it, and from the empathy towards the man conveyed by the camera.
The scene is one of most significant and impressive passages in Aragane, a feature documentary shot, edited, sound-designed and directed by Oda Kaori in 2015. Oda made her debut in 2010 with the short Thus a Noise Speaks, a personal documentary that unflinchingly explored her coming out as gay and the subsequent reactions from her family, especially her mother. The experience of Thus a Noise Speaks, one where the camera is also used, in Oda’s own words, “as a weapon for revenge against my mother,” was a fundamental experience for the young Japanese director, who was 23 years old at the time: Not only because it was a way of expressing her true self, but also because it was a chance to grasp the incredible power that filmmaking can have, and to realize how harmful a camera pointed at someone can be.
Born in Japan, but partly educated in the U.S.[2] and with three formative years spent in Bosnia, Oda’s artistic arc began from a position of hybridity from the very beginning and afterward wandered around the globe in search of places and stories to explore. The sense of displacement experienced and expressed in her debut short, and her background as a so-called “halfie,”[3] opened the gates for a cinema conceived as a nomadic wandering, and an artistic path that in crossing borders, cultures, genres, and styles, explores what it means to be a subject in flux and always open, as the best ethnographers always are, to what the world has to offer[4]. Moving from one geographical area to the next, from Japan to Bosnia, back to Japan and then to Mexico—but a Mexico filtered through Mayan mythology—Oda’s filmography expresses the idea of a nomadic cinema not interested in broad and essentialist discourses about cultures, but more focused on specific places and the collective experiences and memories linked to such places.
Towards an alien phenomenology
The first (and to this day, most artistically accomplished) example of this approach arrived for Oda in 2015, when Aragane was presented at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. A work, as previously mentioned, that she directed, photographed, edited, and sound-designed, but also a “product” of Bela Tarr’s film.factory, the short-lived film school based in Sarajevo and established by the Hungarian director in 2013, a place where Japanese director Oda studied for three years.
Aragane, meaning ore or small pieces of stone in Japanese, was shot in a Bosnian coal mine as a project for film.factory. An immersive and hypnotic sensorial experience, the movie starts, and thus sets the tone for the rest of the work, with a pounding noise and a close-up of a machine. The scene is followed by a short depiction of life on the surface, with workers preparing and completing various tasks before commencing the deep dive into the mine. Once in, we’re in a different kind of world, one where the only lights rippling and dancing in the total darkness are those of the headlights of the workers and of Oda herself, and one where the noise is so deafening and monotonous it turns into a sort of alien music.
Aragane is not a direct inquiry into the harsh conditions of the people working in the mine (although that is something that eventually and necessarily emerges) but more an attempt to convey on screen the time and space of the coal mine as experienced by the people working in it. Creating a sensory experience of the place, an experience constructed through the interplay of machines, darkness, head lamps and the miners, Oda hints at a different field of perception and at a different type of time. For most of the duration of the film, we don’t really know what’s going on and who is doing what: what is missing is a central orientation, a focal point around which the movie can organize itself in the usual sense.
“The darkness, no sunlight, no moonlight”
“timber dust floating”
“pump, electric saws”
“grey fog”
“steam evaporating from T-shirts”
“a flickering head lamp sways”
“A small universe within a universe”.
“I see because there is light”
“In this underground world people and machine carry the same weight”[5]
Once we get accustomed to the things, events and musicality of the noise presented on screen, though, everything slowly begins to make sense. What starts to surface from the images, sounds, tracking shots and slow and hypnotic camera movements, is the time and the materiality of the mine itself. When a long and dark scene towards the end of the movie, with the carts ascending to the surface of the earth, is brutally interrupted by a static image of the outside of the mine covered in snow, it is almost like a revelation. After an hour of darkness inside the bowels of the earth experiencing a different perception of time and space, the whiteness of the snow, the colors of the clothes and those of the equipment hanging are so sharp and bright that gazing upon them almost induces vertigo.
With the sensory and cacophonic descent into the alien landscape that is the life in the mine, Aragane is also an exploration of the relation between the people working inside and the place itself. This is a crucial point in understanding Oda’s works: her films are, for the most part, and especially on first viewing, an overwhelming visual and sensory experience that seem to focus more on the non-human elements of what is filmed. However, when fully absorbed, they reveal the true potential of what her cinema can do at its best: establish a cartography of non-human landscapes and, at the same time, reflect on the role and position of the human element in this “new world.” It is not by chance that the central part of the movie, the core and one of the most significant scenes in the entire documentary, is the beautiful scene that we have described at the very beginning of this essay.
“Tell me how I can touch a butterfly without breaking her wings”[6]
The preoccupation towards people is one of the central themes of Towards a Common Tenderness. Released in 2017, the movie is many things: a visual poem structured like a diary about the experience Oda had while filming her first and second works, but at the same time a reflection on the act of filming, and, as in Thus a Noise Speaks, the power the camera has when pointed at someone.
The movie starts with a beautiful murmur of voices and sounds, with Oda herself pronouncing lines from her memories and reading from Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson and Rosemary Menzies’ Poems for Bosnia. It then moves to a shot of her first movie (a shot of a shot) of her mother crying when Oda comes out. The movie is, in fact, structured as a long letter sent to Oda’s mother, in which the director speaks directly to her mother about her experiences with the camera and everything that happened to her after she decided to become a filmmaker. Toward a Common Tenderness uses a mixed visual style, with abstract and poetic images intertwined with shots recorded by Oda in Bosnia and Herzegovina during her period at Bela Tarr’s school, outtakes not used in Aragane, and other images from unfinished projects.
The central part of the documentary is when Oda was a guest at a family of Romani descent for a week. When talking about this experience, she recalls how she couldn’t finish filming the project because she could not stare at the old husband and go deeper inside him, depicting the loss and grief his family went through when one of their members passed away. Rosemary Menzies’s poem shown at the end of the movie through extreme close-ups of the printed page is exemplary of the conundrum that haunts and informs the whole movie. “Tell me how can I touch a butterfly without breaking her wings.” How can we gracefully depict the beauty of things without destroying it? How can we film reality without annihilating it or destroying the things and the people in it?
“…reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself”[7]
If Aragane is a movie revolving formally around darkness, slow movement, and repetition, and Towards a Common Tenderness a reflection on the riddle that is the act of filming, Cenote is a movie that combines the two approaches.
It is about water, light and their connection to the cosmos, but also about people and their collective memories. Cenotes, or ts’onot in a form of Mayan, are natural sinkholes found in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, the only source of water for people living far away from rivers or lakes, and considered sacred places in ancient Mayan civilization.
Abstract images of the underwater world inside the cenotes intercut with people reciting, almost whispering, old Mayan poems, and other voices, in Spanish, recalling memories about life near these natural pits. Swimming in the water, the camera is enfolded in a reality that is perceived and created by the play of water and light. The first ten minutes, the more experimental part of the work, are in this sense an absolute bliss, an exhilarating and liberating artistic experience that brings us back to the womb of the earth, to the origin of life, or, as one of the quoted Mayan poems states, to the place where the sun sinks, disappears and reappears every day. Blotches and blades of colors flash on screen, drops of water dance like subatomic particles on the surface of water, and fish swim as peacefully as ancient deities. While this formal experimentation is noticeable in the path blazed by Aragane, a cinema of sensation that shifts the representation of humanity towards the periphery of reality, the non-human elements presented in Cenote expand further, reaching the spiritual and the mythical.
Another novelty that Cenote brings when compared to Aragane or even Towards a Common Tenderness is the presence, throughout the film, of a dialogic tension, both aesthetically and thematically, between words and noise, light and water, grainy images and digital sharpness, mythical time and geological time, and people and natural elements. Using 8mm film (Super8) and images shot underwater with an iPhone, Oda creates a difference and an aesthetic space, a poetic “ma” (間) that reflects and has a parallel in the space between the two worlds explored: the sensory experience taking place underwater, on the one hand, and the close-ups of faces and the voices of people on the other. Faces of people, but also animals, chicken, butterflies, dogs, cats, and local festivals are filmed in 8mm, while the world inside the cenotes is filmed with an iPhone. The dialog between these two types of images, the intercut between these two worlds, becomes the structural backbone around which the movie develops.
The sound and words spoken in the movie, folklore, mythical stories, memories of people who live near a cenote, and legends of children who drowned in them are all weaved together, recited and spoken in Yucatec Maya and Spanish. The stories told are important, of course, but the musicality of the words is an element that, paired with the underwater sounds and the distorted noise captured or created by the camera’s microphone, form a sonic tapestry of rare beauty. The soundscape used in Cenote, more than the one adopted in Aragane, where the human voices were relegated to very few words, hints at an idea of the cosmos in which humans are part of a larger dimension, both in time and space. The images confirm this larger scope on a geological scale: the sinkholes are a product of a celestial encounter between a shower of meteorites and the earth’s crust, but at the same time, a mythical place for ancient Mayan civilization, a portal and a threshold where, according to the Popol Vuh, this world and the afterlife touch each other. The connection between these two realms is an important part of Cenote, and, as a matter of fact, the movie also works as an exploration of collective memories and ancient mythologies, both still very present in the area and the villages around these sinkholes. The dead (via the poems), the women sacrificed in the pits, and all the legends and stories retold by the villagers, form a layer where the past, real or mythical, and the present coexist. This present-permeated-by-the-past has a phantasmic quality channeled into the movie by the images in 8mm, which always feel distant from the here and now, and by the voices in Spanish and Yucatec Maya, always out of sync and hovering above the images, as it were. The connection between the dead and the living is made more explicit in a brief and beautiful passage when the movie gazes, bathed in a frail and milky light, at funeral rituals in the area, when human bones and skulls are brushed, polished and collected with extreme care as remnants of past lives.
Conclusion
Like some of the works made at the Sensory Ethnography Lab[8], and to the cinema of Bela Tarr and Wang Bing, Oda’s filmmaking has, in the past years, built a unique trajectory in the film world: a brand of experimental documentary born at the intersection between visual anthropology and a cinema that prioritizes a pre-reflective engagement with the world. The result is an oeuvre that traces and establishes new connections between people, things, memories and the landscape they inhabit and from which they emerge. The human element is thus repositioned and reframed according to a different vision of reality, compared to one that often dominates the field of documentary, especially in contemporary Japan. This artistic approach is also traceable in her works as a painter: for instance, in a series of CD covers of Aragane’s soundtrack she painted by hand. Each cover is a thick impasto depiction of a scene from the movie, or a memory from her filming inside the mine. Another example is a series of portraits of women Oda made inspired by the story of the women who were thrown into the cenotes as ritual sacrifices. In these paintings, the faces of these women seem to resurface from the water like deities, made by the recollection of what Oda experienced while filming and swimming in these sinkholes.
Visual and sonic experimentation which engages with the world and creates a cinema that, while reassessing the human element and abandoning a human-centered perspective on reality, continues at the same time to show a deep care, affection and interest toward people. This is the biggest accomplishment of Oda’s artistic trajectory so far.
[1] Paul Cézanne, quoted in Cezanne’s Doubt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945. Later in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern, 1964).
[2] She studied film at Hollins University in Virginia.
[3] “People whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage” Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Against Culture, in Fox, Richard G. Hg, Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, S. 137–162.
[4] More than fifty years before, a similar approach to documentary was proposed by Matsumoto Toshio: “Matsumoto’s avant-garde documentary theory focused instead on the revelation of the existential force of an object or the actual people filmed through the process of subjective film-making” Hata Ayumi, ‘Filling our empty hands’: Ogawa Productions and the politics of subjectivity in H. Fujiki, A. Phillips ed. The Japanese Cinema Book, Bloomsbury 2020.
note: I took the liberty of writing about a non-Asian documentary today, and it might become the new rule…
Mother of Many Children (1977) is the first feature-length documentary by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, one of the towering figures in contemporary non-fiction cinema, and an artist who has been making films about indigenous struggle, representation, and from a Native perspective for almost five decades. Mother of Many Children is not only her first feature-length film, but also one of her best works, in my opinion—I personally think Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), and Incident at Restigouche (1984) are her two other masterpieces. Insightful, touching, multilayered, and beautifully constructed, it focuses on several Native women of different indigenous people, and from different backgrounds, living in Canada at the time (1977). As Randolph Lewis poignantly notes in his book Alanis Obomsawin The Vision of a Native Filmmaker (University of Nebraska Press, 2006):
Mother of Many Children works on a horizontal plane: rather than diving deep into one or two subjects, it moves around the Canadian landscape every few minutes, pausing to focus on a woman of interest, to take in her story, before moving to another interviewee, often someone quite different. The result of this lateral movement is a feeling that all these women are connected, despite differences in language, tribal affiliation, educational background, and geography.
Clouds of War 戦雲（いくさふむ）(2024) is the latest documentary by journalist and filmmaker Mikami Chie, a director who, in her previous works (The Targeted Village, Boy Soldiers: the Secret War in Okinawa, We Shall Overcome) has been focusing on the current situation in the Ryūkyū archipelago (Okinawa), its complex geopolitical history, and on the resistance of its people against the several American bases operating in the islands. Clouds of War was shot in the span of eight year, starting in 2015, and documents the construction of military ports and ammunition depots by the Japanese Self-defense Force, and more broadly the general militarisation happening in Okinawa main island, Yonaguni Island, Miyako Island, and Ishigaki Island. These spine-chilling changes affecting the land and its citizens, such as the construction of underground shelters built in Yoneguni, or a plan for the evacuation, to Kyūshū, of all the inhabitants, are done in preparation to the next war on the horizon, the one between China and Taiwan. If the picture painted by the documentary is as interesting as it is frightening, less inspired is the way the documentary interweaves all the footage together. The style is journalistic, like in the previous works of the director, but there’s here a lack of focus, in my opinion. It’s very informative nonetheless, and there are some very powerful and profound moments.
Asian Docs 
You must be logged in to post a comment.