YIDFF 2025 – report 3: From the River to the Sea, and the Mountains: Filmmakers in Solidarity with Palestine – A Gathering

Previous reports:
YIDFF 2025: preview
report 1: SPI (Sayun Simung)
report 2: Awards

Although this is the third report from YIDFF 2025, it stands philosophically, so to speak, at the center of what my experience at Yamagata has been this year.

One of the appeals, at least for me, of watching and writing about documentary cinema is that we are compelled—more than in fiction—to reflect on the relationship between images and “reality,” on the act of audiovisual representation, on how it all connects to what is happening in the world, and, not least, on the ethics of filming (see the Itō Shiori’s “case”).

The genocide taking place in Palestine makes us all complicit and guilty in some way, including those who work, in various capacities, within the world of cinema and audiovisual production. Writing about films and attending film festivals are, after all, part of the broader industry that revolves around cinema—documentary included.

An extra-festival initiative, though seemingly supported by YIDFF, took place in Yamagata on October 13th. Titled “From the River to the Sea, and the Mountains: Filmmakers in Solidarity with Palestine – A Gathering” the event was organized by Filmmakers in Resistance and featured special guest Razan AlSalah, director of A Stone’s Throw. It brought together directors, editors, critics, and other film industry professionals from Japan and abroad to reflect on how to dismantle complicity in the machinery and industry of the genocide. 

The event opened with a short introduction summarizing the ongoing massacre in Palestine, which continues despite the so-called “ceasefire.” This was followed by a discussion on the significance of PACBI and its crucial role within the broader movement of solidarity.
The second part of the gathering centered on Razan AlSalah, who spoke at length about her position as a Palestinian filmmaker and about strategies to resist the Israeli colonial project. She emphasized the need to make solidarity material, noting that, in many cases, images themselves have become part of the genocide—they have been weaponized. While watching people die inevitably provokes strong emotions, AlSalah insisted, it is essential that these emotions be transformed into concrete and practical forms of action.
To this end, AlSalah proposed that cinema workers concentrate particularly on two key priorities:
– Contextualize and distribute images responsibly. The circulation of images—particularly on social media—must always be accompanied by context.
Cinema, on the other hand, possesses a different kind of power: the act of watching collectively and engaging in discussion after a screening are integral parts of the viewing experience, helping to situate and deepen our understanding of what appears on screen.
– Acknowledge the role of film and audiovisual workers. It is crucial to recognize that cinema is an industry entangled, as Francesca Albanese has put it, in the “Zionist economy of genocide.”

As a poignant illustration of this entanglement, AlSalah shared a personal story. Based in Montreal, Canada, she recalled an incident involving the collective she is part of, which had planned to screen a Palestinian film at a local cinema (unfortunately, I do not recall the title of the film or the name of the venue). The theater initially agreed to host the screening, but when the collective asked to make visible the economic ties between organizations and the Israeli machinery of genocide, the cinema withdrew its support. 

This personal episode illustrates the need to implicate ourselves in the places where we live and to make solidarity material; positionality, in this sense, is fundamental. Palestine—and its erasure, which extends to people, land, animals, plants, and entire landscapes—is now often consumed as content. In this regard, AlSalah’s statement, “It is important for me that my works re not consumed as art objects, because the market will capitalize on the tragedy,” is a crucial encapsulation of both the gathering’s spirit and the importance of PACBI.
On a somewhat tangential note, this reminded me of the practices and positions against ‘art’ by Zero Jigen in Japan during the 1960s, as well as filmmaker Alberto Grifi’s belief in “moving beyond cinematographic language to embrace the language of life.”

The final part of the event turned its attention to film workers active in Japan. Several participants shared their experiences of solidarity actions carried out over the past two years and provided Japan-specific perspectives on the responses to the ongoing genocide.
In Japan, large-scale demonstrations have not taken place, but smaller protests have nonetheless occurred over the past few years. These actions were largely ignored by mainstream media, yet circulated through alternative channels, such as Discord groups.
What stood out to me was that several demonstrations were also organized in Okinawa, where the Palestinian cause was connected—albeit on a very, very, very different level—with the oppression of the Ryukyuan people. It reminded me of the 1950s and the international class solidarity that was so prominent during that decade; a shining example of this were the screenings of several short documentaries made by Noda Shinkichi and shown two years ago in Yamagata.

It was also fascinating to learn how activism and demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian cause are being organized by queer and LGBT groups in Tokyo, as well as in Japan’s more rural areas.
In conclusion, while there was agreement that PACBI and a material form of boycott and resistance—tied to where one lives and the work one does—are essential, what is also needed in Japan is a wider dissemination of knowledge about what is happening in Palestine and the economic networks that sustain the industry of genocide.

P.S. I have deliberately avoided naming any of the participants in the gathering, except for AlSalah, whose name appeared on the pamphlet.

YIDFF 2025 – report 2: Awards

Previous reports:
YIDFF 2025: preview
report 1: SPI (Sayun Simung)

Yesterday, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival announced the prize winners for this year’s edition. In the International Competition, the main award, the Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize (Grand Prize), went to Direct Action (2024) by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, a documentary about the eco-activism of the so-called ZAD (zone à défendre). I haven’t seen the film yet, but I found it fascinating that it received the top award in Yamagata. According to reviews and people I spoke to during the festival, Direct Action devotes much of its time to the group’s everyday life and self-organizing routines — qualities that seem to echo Ogawa Pro’s Heta Village. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it.

The Mayor’s Prize went to With Hasan in Gaza (2025), directed by Kamal Aljafari, with whom I had the pleasure of having a long and fascinating conversation on my last day at the festival. Some reviewers have described the film as a work of “personal archaeology,” and I couldn’t agree more. Aljafari discovered an old videotape in his camera—footage of himself traveling through Gaza in 2001 with a friend—and decided to turn it into an archival or found-footage documentary. Perhaps less experimental and opaque than his previous work, A Fidai Film (2024), With Hasan in Gaza nonetheless manages to disorient the viewer. As the director explained after one of the screenings in Yamagata, the footage is presented exactly as it was shot, in chronological order, and in its entirety, with nothing edited out—not even the blurred, imperfect, or amateurish images.
According to Aljafari, removing the poorly filmed segments would have been equivalent to erasing the memories of the people and the places filmed —especially when viewed from today’s perspective. That’s why he chose to keep everything. The only editing and intervention, he explained, was limited to the addition of sound and text.

Park by So Yo-Hen won the Denroku Award (Award of Excellence). The documentary follows two Indonesian men conversing under the stars in a park in Tainan. Poems about fellow migrants are read, but soon the film shifts into a more self-reflective mode. Park presents many interesting ideas—as is often the case with works emerging from the Your Bros. Filmmaking Group (see Dorm or Landscape Hunter, for instance)—yet I found it perhaps a bit stretched and meandering.

The other three awards in the International Competition went to Malqueridas (2023) by Tana Gilbert (Flex International Award, Award of Excellence); L’Homme-Vertige: Tales of a City (2024), directed by Malaury Eloi Paisley (Special Mention)—a film I really wanted to see but, unfortunately, couldn’t catch—and Ignacio Agüero’s Letters to My Dead Parents (2025). This was the first film I saw in Yamagata, a documentary composed of old footage of the director’s father and family, interwoven with interviews and images suspended like fragments of a dream to evoke life under the Pinochet regime in Chile. It feels more like a dreamlike patchwork of memories than a linear recollection of the past. Parts of the film are incredibly compelling—the conversation with an elderly union leader recalling his experiences during the military coup is especially powerful.

In the New Asian Currents program, the main prize (Ogawa Shinsuke Prize) was awarded to What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? (2024) by Faraz Fesharaki, which unfortunately I didn’t have the chance to see. The Yamagata Shimbun and YBC Award (Award of Excellence) went to When the Trees Sway, the Heart Stirs (2025) by Lee Jiyoon. The camera moves through Jeongneung Valley in Seoul, an area slated for urban redevelopment where residents are being asked to leave. Elegiac in tone, the film alternates still shots of the neighborhood with conversations with its inhabitants, conveying a striking sense of spatial specificity. As these elements gradually take shape, the work becomes increasingly engaging; in fact, it is one of those rare cases where I felt the documentary could have benefited from a longer running time (it’s only 40′).
In the same program, The Tales of the Tale by Song Cheng-ying and Hu Chin-ya received the Tohoku Denka Kogyo Award (Award of Excellence). It is a beautifully photographed—perhaps a bit too polished?—documentary about an old mine, evoking a ghostly atmosphere by weaving together images of ruins and the memories of miners. In its final minutes, the film reveals that the mine is slated for demolition, and a small group of former workers is opposing it. The relationship between the dead, the living, and the places they inhabit—a theme I mentioned en passant in my previous report—resurfaces here with particular force.

Lastly, the Citizen’s Prize went to Najiba Noori and Rasul (Ali) Noori for their documentary Writing Hawa (2024), which tells the story of a woman who learned to read and write later in life, only to see her dreams shattered by the return of the Taliban regime in 2021.

YIDFF 2025 – report 1: SPI (Sayun Simung)

Read the YIDFF 2025 preview here, and report 2 here

Let’s start from the end. This is a short review of the last movie I saw in Yamagata, SPI by Sayun Simung, whose Millets Back Home I saw at the festival almost exactly 10 years ago.

The film explores what it means to be part of the Tayal Indigenous people in Taiwan in the 2020s. Director Simung approaches this through a first-person documentary, turning the camera toward her own family—as she did in Millets Back Home—crafting both a tribute to her late grandfather and an intimate portrayal of everyday life in the small mountain village of Sqoyaw. 


At the center of the film lies the concept of Gaga, a term apparently difficult to translate, but that has been rendered as Tayal law and cosmology in academic papers. Simung embarks on a search for what Gaga means for her and her relatives, depicting the everyday life of her family while interspersing scenes of natural landscapes—shot in a different aspect ratio—during which she addresses the spirit of her late grandfather. The world of dreams—SPI means “dream” in the Tayal language—as well as that of the ancestors and spirits is a constant but subtle presence throughout the documentary. It unfolds as a sort of hidden dialog between the living and the dead—a theme, once again not in the foreground, that I noticed in many of the documentaries I saw in Yamagata this year.

Unlike many of the works presented in this year’s New Asian Currents, SPI avoids formal experimentation, its apparent simplicity, however, becomes a strength, allowing the film to convey on screen the small joys and struggles the director’s family has to face.

After a meandering opening, the film gains momentum, shifting gears when we discover that the director’s younger sister is pregnant at just seventeen. This development opens up one of the most fascinating sections of the work. At first, the grandmother cannot accept her granddaughter’s pregnancy—because she is too young and also because, possibly, the future husband belongs to a different indigenous group, the Paiwan. One of the most memorable sequences depicts the meeting between the two families: different languages are spoken, and Mandarin becomes the bridge of communication. They discuss how the wedding customs of each group—all of which involve the slaughter of an animal, slightly differ. During these long conversations, the camera often cuts to the faces of the young couple, silent and visibly lost.

As is often the case in documentaries about Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, it is striking to see how traditions and beliefs evolve while seemingly remaining the same. A particularly significant moment comes during a Tayal year-end ceremony, where fireworks light up the night sky. The following shot shows the village from afar, with a church and bell tower standing out—echoing an earlier scene where the grandmother visits the church.

Yet this ongoing search for what defines a Tayal way of life in contemporary Taiwan is only one layer of the film. SPI concludes with a brief, tender scene filmed while the grandfather was still alive, showing him cutting pork—an emblematic choice that underscores how the documentary also serves as a heartfelt farewell from the director to her beloved grandfather, intertwining the personal loss with the broader meditation on tradition and identity.

Just a final note on the title, I would have preferred to keep a translation more faithful to the original which is, I believe, something like Dreams in the Fire Room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C’roh Is Our Name

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

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

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

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

Gentō and mine protests’ screenings in Yamagata (2019)

Today I’m posting a translation of my piece on gentō (magic lanterns) and mine protests originally published in 2019 in Italian on Alias (Saturday supplement of Il Manifesto)

In December 1959, Mitsui, one of Japan’s largest zaibatsu, announced the imminent dismissal of 1,278 coal miners in Miike, southern Japan, as part of a restructuring of the nation’s energy policies. The response was massive. Over 1959–60, the workers first formed a new union and then launched a series of strikes and protests—among the largest the country had ever seen.

The protests and uprisings that shook Japan in the late 1960s—against the construction of the Narita Airport, in Okinawa, and in the streets merging with student movements—have been widely documented in both fiction and non-fiction films, as well as in written form. By contrast, labor and resistance movements of the previous decade remain a far less familiar chapter, both in Japan and abroad.

One important exception is perhaps Kamei Fumio’s 1955–56 trilogy on the resistance against the U.S. base at Sunagawa—protests that achieved tangible victories and, on a cinematic level, anticipated the documentary practices of Ogawa Production in later decades.

At the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2019, a satellite event held outside the usual venues on October 12 revisited this earlier period, with special screenings devoted to gentō and the grassroots movements that flourished in the 1950s. The spirit and strategies of resistance against capital and corporate power that emerged on the international stage in the 1960s cannot be fully understood without first recognizing the protests and class alliances forged in the preceding decade.

Gentō—literally “magic lantern”—was a technology that had enjoyed wide popularity in the late 19th century before being displaced by cinema, yet in Japan it experienced a surprising revival during the 1950s. Essentially an early form of the slideshow, gentō projections combined a sequence of still images with live narration and, often, music. This seemingly “obsolete” medium was repurposed by labor collectives, Okinawan anti-occupation activists, students, and citizens engaged in a variety of struggles, since it was cheaper and more accessible than cinema at a time when portable film formats were not yet widespread in the archipelago. These performances thus became a powerful means of circulating experiences of resistance, while also resonating with deep-rooted cultural traditions.

The three gentō screenings shown in Yamagata, introduced and performed by professors Washitani Hani and Toba Koji, evoked the atmosphere of Japanese silent cinema, when more often than not, a benshi live narration would shape the tone and meaning of the film. They also recalled kamishibai, the popular paper-theater storytelling format for children, long familiar across Japan.

Underground Rage, the first piece, dates to 1954—before the major strikes—but already captured the mounting tensions between management and miners. It recounts the “113 Days Without Heroes” of 1953, a protest against layoffs that involved workers and their families. “We are not Mitsui’s slaves!” “The company wants to kill us!”—these slogans framed a furious indictment of exploitation, aiming to forge a class consciousness that reached beyond Miike to farmers and other workers across the archipelago.

The second work, Bloody Battle in Miike: Never Forgive These Atrocities, is perhaps the most emblematic. It documents a massive demonstration in March 1960 outside Mitsui’s offices where not only did the police intervene, but the yakuza were called in to suppress the protest. Photographs show about 200 gangsters from two different syndicates surrounding workers with clubs and other weapons. One even brandishes an axe, believed to have been used in the killing of protester Kubo Kiyoshi, who was brutally murdered on March 29, 1960.

The third work, Unemployment and Rationalization: Never Put Out the Fire of Botayama (1959), examines the looming mine closures and, more broadly, the operating methods of the zaibatsu—the powerful capitalist conglomerates—and their impact on miners’ families, particularly women and children. It depicts homes reduced to shacks without electricity, chronic food shortages, and malnourished children forced to survive on a single meal a day. It is a bleak portrait that echoes across eras and geographies, whenever the capitalist machine consumes the vulnerable and consigns the “expendable” to sacrifice.

The Miike mines would return to the headlines in tragedy in 1963, when an explosion killed nearly 500 people and poisoned thousands, and again in 1997 with another fatal accident that led to their final closure. These gentō shows serve both as invaluable records—produced from within—of a vanished era, and as proof that an “outdated” technology, when adapted to a cause and a moment, can become powerfully expressive, effective, and even modern.

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2025 – preview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the full line-up here

See you in Yamagata!




Places of film culture in Japan /2: Royal Theater in Gifu 岐阜ロイヤル劇場

This is the second article in a series about “The Places of Film Culture in Japan” :  cinema archives (big or small, independent or state-funded), film museums, and community cinema centers that foster a love for cinema and emphasize the importance of preserving and studying the history of audiovisual production.

You can read the first, Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan 羽島市映画資料館, here.

This article is a translation of my piece originally written for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. Since it was written for a general audience, the article retains its broad approach.

Since the dawn of cinema, movie theaters have been an integral part of the evolution of urban areas. The Japanese archipelago is no exception: more than one phase of its urbanization coincided with the expansion of movie theaters, places that built the social fabric of an area, whether urban or rural.

During the golden age of Japanese cinema in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were over 7,000 movie theaters in Japan. This number declined sharply when television became a central part of every household. 1964 was a crucial period in this sense; the Tokyo Olympics sparked a significant increase in television purchases that year. Additionally, some of the country’s major film studios went bankrupt in the early 1970s, and in the 1980s, a subsequent metamorphosis of cinematic spaces occurred. The advent of mini-theaters, small cinemas that screened (and still screen) independent or arthouse films from around the world.

The introduction of videocassettes and DVDs, as well as the proliferation of multiplexes in large shopping malls over the last twenty-five to thirty years, have contributed to epochal changes in how people experience cinema and inhabit Japan’s urban fabric. The relocation of cinemas, restaurants, entertainment venues, bars, and shops from historic city centers—which are rare in Japanese cities—to shopping complexes outside the city limits has furthered the emptying of entire urban areas.

This is especially true for small provincial towns, whose shōtengai have turned into ghost towns or hallucinations of a bygone era. Shōtengai refers to pedestrian streets, often covered arcades—as those loved and explored by Walter Benjamin in Paris—where various commercial establishments, small shops, restaurants, bars, cinemas, and small theaters are, or rather were, grouped. Though small commercial streets have existed since time immemorial, especially in front of temples and shrines, these urban areas evolved into covered arcades during the Showa period (1926–1989), especially near train stations.

The shift towards online shopping and the consumption of audiovisual products at home has led to the further decline of the shōtengai, a waning that had already started in the 1980s.
In recent years, these places have become known colloquially as shattagai, a portmanteau word that refers to the desolation of these places and a blending of the terms shattaa (shutter) and gai (town or urban area). In these arcades, most shops are now closed, or, if they are still open, they are run by longtime owners who aren’t ready to give up.
In large cities, some of these shotengai remain active, or at least afloat, thanks to the growing urban population and tourists seeking places with a bygone Showa-period feel. Others are undergoing gentrification and being demolished to make way for tall residential buildings.

The situation in small provincial towns is more complicated. Many of these towns are depopulating, a problem linked to the influx of younger generations from the countryside to the cities and the aging of the Japanese population more broadly.

Gifu is a city located at the geographic center of Japan’s main island, Honshū, and is halfway between a provincial and a metropolitan area. Although large, Gifu is not a metropolitan city in itself. It is too close to Nagoya, Japan’s third-largest city, and is slowly becoming its suburban area.

One of the town’s covered arcades is home to Japan’s only movie theater that exclusively shows movies on film. The Gifu Royal Gekijō (Gifu Royal Theater) is a repertory theater that shows one movie per week, with screenings three or four times each day, in the morning and afternoon. The theater is located in an area of the arcade known as Gekijō Dōri, or Theater Street, which, as the name suggests, once housed numerous theaters and cinemas.

Only vestiges remain of its glorious past. In addition to the Royal Gekijō, there is a small theater that shows contemporary films, Cinex, owned by the same company that manages the repertory cinema, and a theater for live performances.

Royal Gekijō evolved from numerous theaters and cinemas that opened and closed over the decades. The first venue was first opened in 1926 and later on, in 1955, became a large theater managed by the Tōei studio. Then, it changed hands over the following decades until its closure in the early 2000s. In 2009, the theater began hosting occasional events dedicated to Showa-era cinema. Given their relative success, these events later became a regular feature.

The entrance of the cinema, on the first floor, is decorated with large figures of stars from the golden age of Japanese cinema. These figures include Takakura Ken, Kiyoshi Atsumi, Asaoka Ruriko, Mifune Toshirō, and Hara Setsuko. The decorations serve as a sort of portal and conceptual introduction to the venue. This time machine effect, as it were, continues with the songs played in the theater before each screening. Mainly songs that were popular in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s.

The film program is varied, but only Japanese feature films are shown nowadays—when the Showa program was launched, it also screened movies from the U.S. or Europe.  These include melodramas produced by Shōchiku, jidaigeki by Tōei and Tōhō, comedies and satires that are still little known outside the archipelago, and mini-retrospectives dedicated to actors, directors, and sometimes even the locations where the films were shot – with a particular attention to films shot in Gifu prefecture. 

Every summer, to commemorate the end of the Pacific War and the tragedy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the theater showcases films with strong anti war content or powerful pacifist messages. This year, the program is particularly significant, as it marks the 80th anniversary of the war’s end. In July and August, films such as Kinoshita Keisuke’s Army (1944) and Twenty-Four Eyes, as well as the trilogy Men and War—directed by Yamamoto Satsuo for Nikkatsu between 1970 and 1973—are being screened.

In my ten years of going to the theater, I have been struck and impressed more than once by the sheer power of the viewing experience itself, regardless of the movie’s quality. Needless to say, seeing a movie—especially a 35mm film in TōhōScope or one of the other large-format experiments the studios tried in the 1950s and 1960s—is a different experience than watching a DCP screening. This is true even though many of the films are not in optimal condition.

As for the type of audience that usually attends the screenings at the Royal Gekijō, most viewers are over seventy. Through the movies, they can relive their youth or perhaps seek a couple of hours of relief from the heat in summer and the cold in winter. In this sense, the experience is almost like visiting a museum, or perhaps more akin to going to a Shōwa-kan or a Taishō-kan, places that recreate or preserve the atmosphere of bygone eras and evoke a strong sense of nostalgia.

As we have seen, the history and future of cinematic exhibition is linked to and depends on the evolution of urban spaces and, therefore, on how its inhabitants experience the city. It will be interesting to see if and how cinema—here considered as a collective experience—will endure or transform further, or if it will remain a shared dream that only a few will remember.

Isobe Shinya Retrospective: A Beautiful Anachronism (2025)

A traveling retrospective dedicated to Isobe Shinya, one of the most interesting directors in the contemporary Japanese experimental film scene, was held in various cities in Japan in recent months (with more places and dates to come). At the end of June, the retrospective, 美しい時代錯誤 A Beautiful Anachronism, visited Nagoya Cinema Neu (formerly Nagoya Cinematheque), where I had the pleasure of meeting Isobe and attending a screening of five of his films made between 2009 and 2022. An excerpt of his new work, which is still in progress, was also screened.

A primary theme running through all of Isobe’s works is time—more specifically, the various temporalities and durations that the camera can capture and create. Isobe’s preferred film medium is 8 or 16 millimeters, but he almost always edits and works on his films digitally. The exceptions are Dance, shot and edited on film, and Humoresque, which was shot in digital.
His time-lapse and long exposure works capture extended periods of time and greatly accelerate the pace at which we usually experience it. This gives the viewers a sense of vertigo and a new perspective on things. It invites us to reconsider our position in the world, hinting at different times: seasonal, geological, astronomical.

The first film presented at the retrospective was Dance (2009), an assignment Isobe completed for the Film Research Institute as part of a class he was taking at the time. The six-minute short was shot in 8mm over the course of a week, with filming taking place for about five or six hours every night in a room where a girl was living. The room was dark, and the only source of light during the shooting came from the streetlights outside.
The altered and accelerated time of the work highlights the quasi-life of the objects in the room and offers an accumulation of personal memories—the young protagonist was Isobe’s girlfriend at the time and she would eventually become his wife (later seen in Humoresque).

Objects and ruins also play a central role in his next work, EDEN (2011), Isobe’s graduation project at Image Forum Film Institute. Filmed over the course of a year and a half, with monthly visits of three or four days, to the abandoned Matsuo mine complex (operating from 1914 to 1979) in Iwate Prefecture. The film captures the area’s decay and showcases how life moves forward when is freed from the anthropic element. The images and hypnotic music create the impression of a ghost village slowly being reclaimed by vegetation and slipping into (human) oblivion.
First, the camera focuses on the interiors of former miners’ and their families’ homes. Then, in time-lapse segments, the camera pans to the open spaces surrounding the village and the expanse of the sky. Isobe makes his work almost meta-cinematic by superimposing images of the mines within a room and including stop-motion shots reminiscent of Itō Takashi‘s work. These shots feature photographs of the area within frames of the ruins themselves. As with most of Isobe’s work, EDEN has a pivotal moment toward the end: a crescendo accompanied by a sudden burst of rock music when snow starts to slowly rise from the ground in reverse, with the crystals ascending to the sky.

As you can see in the short clip posted below, music plays an important part in his next film too, For Rest (2017). Here Isobe shifts his focus to the decomposition of a set table in a forest. Filmed over five years with progressively longer intervals in the woods at the foot of Mount Fuji in Shizuoka Prefecture, the film documents the table’s decomposition and the gradual takeover by vegetation and insects. Isobe originally intended to film it in the Aokigahara Forest in Yamanashi; thus, the theme of death permeates the whole work. As Isobe stated, the film “contrasts the human tendency to separate and distance life and death from each other with the cycle of life in nature.”

Even more distant from our everyday lives in scope is the cosmic time depicted in Isobe’s 2020 masterpiece, 13. This short film is composed of images of the sun captured at 13-second intervals from the same position over five years.
The result is a cosmic journey through time and space, but structurally confined from a fixed point of view, depicting the sun’s passage across the sky where light, time, and space beautifully converge to create an abstract calligraphy on a red and purple canvas.
I previously wrote about 13 here.

The final piece in the retrospective, Humoresque (2022), was also filmed over about five years. It is Isobe’s first work shot entirely digitally, marking a departure from his previous works. It is different also in that the subject is in this case his family: his wife and young son. What impressed me most about Humoresque was the subtle play and experimentation with sound. All of the sounds were added in post-production (I think); this is the first time Isobe has worked with sound distortion rather than time distortion. The result is a playful, powerful, and subtly experimental home movie of sorts.

Isobe is currently shooting his next film. The provisional title is April, so it was introduced, although he said it might change. An excerpt was screened at the retrospective, and from the few minutes shown, it appears to be composed of images of rivers, water, and other natural elements overlapping. It looks really promising.

Places of film culture in Japan: 1/ Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan 羽島市映画資料館

Upon discovering the Japan Community Cinema Center and its annual reports on film culture and its diffusion throughout the country, I was inspired to republish this old post. I hope this is the start of a series of articles about “The Places of Film Culture in Japan,” exploring the various cinema archives (big or small, independent or state-funded), film museums, and community cinema centers that foster a love for cinema and emphasize the importance of preserving and studying the history of audiovisual production.

Originally posted in 2018 and re-edited in September 2023 (further re-editing: 2025, June).

There’s a place I’ve wanted to visit since moving to Gifu Prefecture that I discovered by chance while surfing the Internet. It’s a small, movie-related museum located in Hashima City: the Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan 羽島市映画資料館

Movie museums, archives, and places devoted to preserving and documenting the history of cinema and movies (big spectacles, home movies, and video art alike) are becoming an increasingly interesting field for me to explore. Therefore, even though it is, strictly speaking, not about documentaries, but rather about documenting films and their history, I have decided to start a series of posts about Japan’s few but active film museums and film centers (2025 correction: I was wrong, there are in Japan more facilities dedicated to cinema than I thought. Also I have not continued the series…shame on me).

The most famous are the National Film Archive in Tokyo and the Kobe Planet Film Archive in Hyogo. The latter is a place that has been featured many times on this blog. It is a mini-theater and archive—perhaps an exemple of counter archival practices in the archipelago?—that I have visited many times, and through which I have discovered many important movies. Another museum I visited a couple of years ago is the Toy Film Museum in Kyoto. It was recently in the international news because of the discovery of a film by Ozu Yasujirō that was once believed to be lost, Tokkan Kozo.

The Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan, located on the outskirts of the “empire” in an old area of the city of Hashima, is housed in a small, two-story building.

Established in 1996, the museum shares the building with the Folk History Museum. However, its appearance (at least from the inside) is more reminiscent of a cinema museum than an ethnographic museum. For instance, at the ground floor entrance, visitors are welcomed by dozens of film posters from different eras.

The main exhibition space is located on the second floor, where one room is filled with old movie cameras, some of which are bulky machines dating back to the 1940s. There are also flatbed editors, speakers, and posters—a real feast for the eyes. As you can see in the photo below, there are even some seats from an old theater. The seats probably belonged to the Takehana Asahi Cinema, a beloved theater that was an important part of the local community. The theater was active between 1934 and 1971, and the museum stands in the same spot as the Takehana Asahi Cinema.

Even after its closure, the old building remained intact and untouched until the end of the 1980s. Around that time, the people of Hashima started pressuring the city to bring a cinema back to their neighborhood. The interest was probably sparked by the advent of mini-theaters during the decade and fueled by the money flowing through the bubble period. Around 1992, an inspection revealed that the building was dilapidated and in danger of collapsing. However, hundreds of movie posters were discovered inside its vaults. This led to the decision to embark on a new project: the establishment of a movie museum. The new building was modeled after the old theater on its south facade and after Takegahana Castle on its west facade.

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(the old Takehana Asahi Cinema and the South facade of the museum, source )

The other room is set up like a screening room, with rows of chairs in the center and a small screen at the far end. Film posters and other memorabilia adorn the walls, mainly from the golden age of Japanese cinema and jidai-geki movies.

For me, the highlights were two very old and beautiful long posters from the 1930s, but unfortunately, I could not take photos of them. According to its website, the museum stores over 50,000 items, including posters and other memorabilia. Only a small portion of these items were on display the day I visited.

On the second Saturday of every month, the main room turns into a screening room where people gather to watch and discuss movies chosen by the museum staff. Films screened this year included I Want to Be a Shellfish (1959), Nobuko Rides on a Cloud (1955), and The Bullet Train (1975).

The museum sets a good example of what local movie theaters outside big cities could become: a place to preserve and celebrate cinema and film culture. They could also function as small repertory theaters or community cinemas.

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Interview with Soejima Shinobu

Something not related to the world of documentary today: I translated my June 2024 interview with the talented stop-motion artist Soejima Shinobu. I met her at an exhibition in Kanazawa, where her latest short, 私の横たわる内臓 My Organs Lying on the Ground, was screened for a week or so. 
The piece was originally published in Italian in Alias on August 17, 2024.

On a different note, she is pitching her new project, 彼女の話をしよう Talking About Her (currently in production), at the ongoing Annecy International Animation Film Festival, on June 10.

Soejima Shinobu is a Japanese artist who has been active in the world of stop motion animation for the last decade. She creates fascinating short films that blend her interest in Asian and Japanese folklore and religious practices with her passion for sculpture. In these experimental works, which have been presented at various international events, Soejima prioritizes the materiality of the puppets and their environments over the narrative elements.

In 2018, Soejima created The Spirits of Cairn, a story in which a guardian must contend with heads of birds appearing and disappearing in a cemetery. The following year, in House Rattler, she brought the spirits of an old house to life as imagined in Japanese folklore. Her most successful and accomplished work to date is perhaps Blink in the Desert (2021), a short film in which a boy/monk is overcome with guilt after killing a moth.

Her latest work, My Organs Lying on the Ground, was presented last June [2024] in Kanazawa, in a small exhibition that displayed also some of her sculptures. It is a short film that reinterprets a Japanese spiritual practice known as tainai kuguri, a purifying journey through the bowels of the earth. In this piece, which makes extensive use of organic materials such as meat, insects and cereals, Soejima creates a space where the boundaries between earthly life and the afterlife, between organism and inorganic matter, and between inside and outside dissolve
I had the opportunity to speak with the artist at the exhibition.

私の横たわる内臓 My Organs Lying on the Ground

How did you get into stop motion animation?

I have always been interested in sculpture ever since I was a child. I continued making sculptures until the end of my bachelor’s program when my professor realized I had a talent to creating stories, then he suggested I combine the two.

Very soon, I quickly realized that I loved stop motion animation. With sculpture, I usually had to keep all my work in my studio, which took up a lot of space. With film, however, I was able to edit and distort my work and film the whole process, which I really enjoy. I am also interested in the idea that, by filming materials decompose and transform into different forms, I can preserve the essence of the sculpture.

Could you talk about your creative process? On your website, you have collected images from your research journeys. Do you start from places, or do you start from a story you want to tell? Or, do the images guide you?

I usually think about the setting first. The environment in which the events take place is crucial to me. For example, in my first film, The Spirits of Cairn, I wanted to depict the story of someone who died very young and I tried to think of the best way to represent a place between life and death. I started with an image of dozens of bird heads in a place with many cavities that must be kept empty by a guardian of some kind.

For my second film, House Rattler, which is set in my grandmother’s old house, I also started with the setting. For my latest work, My Organs Lying on the Ground, I wanted the characters to be even more connected to the environment to reflect ideas from ecology and animism. To bring this concept to life, I decided to use organic materials because, when we consume something, it goes back to the earth. Plants grow back, and we eat again. It’s a repeating cycle.

Since the puppets are literally empty bodies that resemble human beings but have no soul, I thought these organic materials could connect them to their surroundings. This concept is also similar to a Buddhist view of reality: a fish does not exist in and of itself; we call something a fish because it is in the water.

Sticking with the religious theme, your latest work, My Organs Lying on the Ground, but also The Spirits of Cairn is based on the ritual and spiritual practice known as “tainai kuguri” (passing through the womb). What role do religious practices play in your work?

I come from a religious family and so from the time I was born I have something I can believe in, so I think it’s something very real to me, although I’m not very sure I’m as religious as my parents. I was also influenced by my time in Malaysia, where I lived from the time I was twelve years old until I was twenty, I remember for example that there were tropical fruits rotting on the ground and when no one touched them, they would dissolve into. But the Malaysians don’t think this is wasteful because they believe in this cycle, sometimes you eat the fruits, sometimes you let them rot on the ground and from there plants and new fruits grow back. I remember this image very clearly, partly because it goes against what the Japanese usually think, if you see something rotting on the ground, you immediately think of waste and a sense of dirtiness. Hindu culture also influenced me a lot, in my years in Malaysia of course, but also later when I went to Nepal to do research.

The puppets’ eyes in many of your works, especially in Blink in the Desert, have an uncommon expressiveness. Could you talk about how you achieve this effect?

I usually use glass eyes like the ones used for stuffed animals. When light hits them, they seem to move and take on an almost watery appearance. This technique comes from Buddhist and Japanese sculptures, as well as Asian sculptures in general. Special crystals were used for the eyes when making these statues. Long ago, Buddhist temples had no artificial lights, so candles were used. When the flickering candlelight hit the statues’ eyes, they looked very watery and almost alive.

In My Organs Lying on the Ground, the expressions and eyes of your puppets seem kinder to me, and the colors seem warmer and less cold than in your previous short film. Is this just my impression?

In my penultimate work, Blink in the Desert, I tried to portray the main character’s inner confusion and negative feelings, so the film ended up being rather emotionally intense. For this latest work, however, I tried something different, something more related to sculpture that could only be realized through stop motion. I thought a lot about how to make the puppets because combining them with organic material might shock viewers. In the past, dolls were used in Japan to expel sins or evil spirits from people, and then they were thrown into rivers. Perhaps all of this influenced the look of the puppets I used in my short film, as well as my decision to use positive, almost party-like music to accompany it.

It seems to me that your work tends to emphasize the symbolic and allegorical over the purely narrative. There is a story, but it is not linear.

When I create my work, I feel as if I am documenting sculptures and their changes over time. In this sense, I have been influenced by postminimalism, especially Richard Serra’s approach. Stop motion animation and the puppets I use are very real to me. Through them, I can show reality in a tactile way, so to speak, which is what interests me. This approach was also influenced by the pandemic, especially in my last short film. While working on Blink in the Desert, I was confined to my small room for nearly a year. I felt disconnected from the world, communicating solely through screens, and it seemed as if my body and feelings were detached. I needed physical interaction with the environment and to return to a tactile and material level.