Komori Haruka, Spring, On the Shores of Aga 春、阿賀の岸辺にて (2025)

This is the fourth and final dispatch from this year’s Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions. You can read the first three here, here, and 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.

One of the four works commissioned by the festival this year is Spring, On the Shores of Aga (春、阿賀の岸辺にて, 2025) by Komori Haruka, a filmmaker I was familiar with through two of her previous works, Under the Wave, On the Ground (波のした、土のうえ, 2014) and Double Layered Town / Making a Song to Replace Our Positions 二重のまち／交代地のうたを編む (2019), both co-written with Seo Natsumi. While I couldn’t really connect with the latter, the former is a fascinating look at a specific and distinctive time and place in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011, a glimpse into people’s lives during the period of slow reconstruction when mainstream media attention is fading. What is captured on screen is the slow rebuilding of an area flattened by the ocean, but also the rebuilding of the lives of the survivors and their coping with the sense of guilt towards the dead, expressed here through a landscape cinema approach and the voices and memories of the people.

Another tragedy, and the people affected by it, is the subject of Spring, On the Shores of Aga, a tragedy of a very different kind that has almost silently struck the area along the Agano River in Niigata Prefecture over the decades. Niigata Minamata Disease occurred around 1964, during a period of rapid economic growth in the archipelago, when the Showa Electrical Company’s chemical plant in Kanose released large quantities of methylmercury into the Agano River, poisoning the food chain and contaminating the fish eaten by the people living in the villages in the region.

The lives of those affected by the disease were famously captured and depicted in Satō Makoto’s debut, Living on the River Agano (阿賀に生きる, 1992) and in part in the subsequent Memories of Agano (阿賀の記憶, 2005). I have written extensively about Satō and his documentaries, so this new film by Komori is particularly fascinating to me, not only because it focuses on Hatano Hideto, the head of the Niigata Minamata Disease Support Group in Yasuda, and his struggles and commitment to helping the victims for almost five decades, but also because it is partly a reflection on how Living on the River Agano has now become part of the fabric and memories of the area. 

In fact, Hatano was one of the driving forces behind Satō’s debut, and over the years has been very vocal about keeping the focus on the victims of the disease and their struggles alive, even after they have passed away. Hatano still screens Living on the River Agano every year on 4 May, when he holds a memorial service called “On the Shores of Aga” to commemorate the victims of the disease and those who have worked to alleviate their plight over the years. This event is part of the activities that, as we learn from the film, he has been leading for decades, a kind of cultural movement called Meido no miyage (a final wish, something someone wants to do before dying).

Komori became interested in the Agano River and Hatano’s activities after seeing Living on the River Agano more than a decade ago, and in 2022 she decided to move to the area to film the man. While the central subject of the documentary is undoubtedly Hatano and his efforts and struggles to commemorate and memorialise the events that have shaped the Agano basin over the past sixty years, I felt that the core of the film was the sense of community forged between the very few victims still alive, their relatives and descendants, the people who have fought for their recognition, and those victims – the majority, including those depicted in Satō’s films – who are no longer of this world. This is what struck me most: how the relationship between people directly or indirectly affected by the disease does not end when someone dies, but continues to be part of an ecosystem of mourning and remembrance, made possible also by the role played by Satō’s documentaries.

The film was screened in the museum’s theatre on the day I visited, but it is currently being shown as an installation until 23 March.

Oda Kaori, Recording with Mother “Working Hands” 母との記録「働く手」(2025)

This is the third dispatch from this year’s Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions. You can read the first two here and 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.

After presenting アンダーグラウンドUnderground, her latest work concluding a trilogy of sorts dedicated to the exploration of subterranean spaces, at the last Tokyo International Film Festival, a film which will be screened at this year’s Berlinale, Oda Kaori returns to focus on a more personal and private story with Recording with Mother “Working Hands” (母との記録「働く手」).
This medium-length (41′) work was one of the four projects commissioned by this year’s festival and continues to document the artist’s engagement with her mother, a relationship that gave rise to the short film Karaoke Cafe BOSA in 2022 and launched her career as a filmmaker with 2012’s Thus a Noise Speaks, a film in which Oda expressed and documented her coming out to her family.

Oda’s approach seems to come from a place of curiosity about her mother’s life; the artist herself has said that there was a lot about her mother’s life that she didn’t know, such as the fact that she was the second youngest of ten siblings and that she lost her father when she was five. The film begins with images of domesticity, her mother working in the house, making some sort of wooden craft, while singing and talking to her daughter. Actually, there is no conversation, but the woman’s words are superimposed on the images as a kind of narration, a narration that from the very beginning conveys her confusion about Kaori’s gender: “I don’t know if I should call them son or daughter”. 

The work is structured to mirror the story of her mother’s life, but backwards, from the closure of the small karaoke café she ran for a few years before and during the pandemic, through the various jobs she went through during her life, back to her childhood’s places.
We learn that at the age of 15 she went to work in a wool mill in Aichi Prefecture, and after graduating while working in Kyoto, she became a telephone operator in Osaka. Returning to her hometown of Takashima in Nagasaki Prefecture, she became pregnant with her first child at the age of 23 and subsequently married. 

The seeming simplicity and rigour with which the images tell the story once again reveals Oda’s visual talent; the framing is never improvised but always purposeful, as is the use of natural light, shadows and shots of the sky and clouds that open the film. Moreover, there is almost no camera movement throughout the film, leaving room for a static camera filming her mother working in the kitchen, moving around the house, or travelling by train to her hometown and the house where she grew up, now covered by vegetation.

The film ends with her mother back at home carving a small wooden figurine, an object that seems to reflect Oda’s own effort: a heartfelt message made to thank and celebrate her mother.

The film was screened in the museum’s theatre on the day I visited, but it is currently being shown as an installation until 23 March. The exhibition space also features a vibrant oil painting by Oda herself.

Docs: Images and Records – Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 – report 2: Nihon University Film Study Club Special

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.

Docs: Images and Records – Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 – report 1

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.

なみのこえ 気仙沼/新地町 Voices From the Waves: Shinchi-machi and Kesennuma (Sakai Kō and Hamaguchi Ryūsuke, 2013)

This is the translation of an article I originally wrote in Italian about two years ago for Sonatine.it, a contemporary Japanese cinema portal I often collaborate with.

Voices from the Waves is the second part of a trilogy of documentaries directed by Sakai Kō and Hamaguchi Ryūsuke about the disaster that struck northeastern Japan in March 2011. This second part consists of two documentaries, Voices of the Waves Kesennuma and Voices of the Waves Shinchi-machi. The only difference between the two works is that they were filmed in two different locations and are about the people who lived and experienced the disaster in two different but geographically very close areas. Both documentaries consist mainly of conversations between two people, often family members or colleagues, who survived the earthquake and tsunami.

Both films begin with images of the silent landscape of the areas, the sea and the waves, houses under construction and the remains of buildings that no longer exist. The idea around which the conversations take place is very simple: each person begins by telling where they were and what they were doing on the day of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, and from there memories and reflections unfold.

In the first conversation of the Shinchi-machi film, a father and his grown-up daughter sit across from each other. As they recall the arrival of the tsunami and the size of the waves, their conversation is briefly interrupted by the father’s tears as he remembers friends and acquaintances who have disappeared, swept away by the tsunami. From the very first scenes, one of the trilogy’s strengths becomes clear: the moving stories of people who remember become something much more empathetic for the viewer than the flood of images of the disaster. In today’s mediascape, and the Japanese triple disaster of 2011 has become a striking case in point, spectacular images often fade from view in the few moments they are seen, leaving no trace. It is then that words, tone and intonation – in this case the man’s pronounced northeastern accent – manage to convey something much deeper and more affecting than the visual element alone.

Among the various couples we hear and see, whether friends, spouses or colleagues, some recall the difficulty of communicating with their loved ones in the moments immediately after the earthquake and the fact that they turned to images broadcast on television or circulated on the Internet. One of the most interesting parts of the first documentary is when we listen to two fishermen, both of whom were no longer fishermen at the time of the interview, but were doing other things to survive. This conversation, which is more edgy and direct and touches on the issue of radiation in the sea, reflects the character and occupation of the two and provides an interesting but painful variation on the people and personalities affected by the tragedy. The same problems that gripped the area in the aftermath of the disaster are perceived differently depending on people’s social class and economic background. It should be noted that some of these conversations are between a resident of the area and one of the two filmmakers, who then stands in for the second interviewee, but we will return to this important point later.

The second documentary, as the title suggests, was shot in Kesennuma, one of the towns hardest hit by the tsunami. It begins with a night-time view of the town’s harbour and then moves to the first conversation, probably recorded in the evening, between two colleagues working in a bar-restaurant. They share the memory and the feeling of despair and fear when they heard the sound of cars and houses colliding and destroying each other on that tragic day. A middle-aged couple does not want to remember the day of the tsunami because it is still so fresh, even though a year has passed since the tragedy. What emerges here is the willingness of the local people to forget, not to not remember, but to move on and not to base their future lives on the disaster. This is a sentiment that has emerged more and more in recent years, especially in Fukushima, and is often found in many communities affected by natural or man-made disasters, such as mercury poisoning and the resulting Minamata Syndrome, which Tsuchimoto Noriaki has explored in his documentaries.
Tsuchimoto, one of Japan’s greatest documentary filmmakers, who has devoted much of his career to following the lives of the victims of Minamata Syndrome, has often commented on how, after decades of documentaries on the subject, many of the victims’ relatives began to treat him coldly. It is therefore important to emphasise one more time that the conversations in Hamaguchi e Ko’s documentaries were filmed just over a year after the triple disaster, when the pain and memories were still fresh, but also when the perspective of those affected by the earthquake and tsunami was slowly but surely changing.

The talking pairs are often in an airy space, especially in the first documentary, where the conversations take place inside buildings, but with large windows looking out. The chosen setting therefore gives a sense of spaciousness and grandeur that an enclosed space would not allow. Between one conversation and the next, there are short ‘pillow shots’, scenes showing the area being rebuilt, the sea, the waves, the excavators and cranes that are still constantly at work. Although these images often capture the landscape filmed by a horizontally moving camera, the entire trilogy differs from most documentaries made about the earthquake and tsunami in that it is composed of mostly static shots. Many of the works that have attempted to document the plight of the local population and the triple disaster over the years have in fact done so through shots taken from a moving vehicle, partly because the vastness of the area affected by the tsunami requires it, but this choice of filming also ended up becoming almost a documentary style in itself and a cliché of how to film the disaster.

It is also significant that the two documentaries are not constructed with interviews, a practice used and abused in the aftermath of the triple disaster, which establishes a relationship of power and impartiality between interviewee and interviewer. Conversations between two people, even though they take place in a staged and constructed space, with at least two cameras and two directors in the room, achieve something different. No one intervenes from outside, of course there is editing, but a kind of horizontal and equal dialogue is created, because these are people who have experienced the tragedy first hand. In this sense, the fact that the two directors intervene in some of the conversations is interesting, almost revealing the “artificiality” of the work, but in the long run it reduces the impact of the two films. The same could be said of the different angles and techniques used to film the two interlocutors (this insightful essay by Markus Nornes is illuminating); while in some cases this works almost perfectly, in others it exacerbates a sense of artificiality that detracts from what is being said.
There is, however, one part where all these techniques are used to the full, and that is the final conversation of Voices From the Waves Kesennuma, when a young couple, a man and a woman aged 26 and 23, amid silences, awkwardness, nervous smiles, ringing mobile phones and yawns, bring out the cinematic power of the unspoken, of gestures and pauses, making this scene perhaps the most touching and at the same time amusing of all those seen in both works.

新しい神様 The New God (Tsuchiya Yutaka, 1999)

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!”.

  1. 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). ↩︎

Best (favorite) documentaries and discoveries of 2024

As usual, the list below reflects my tastes, interests and viewing habits during the year. Some works are from 2023, but only became available here in Japan in 2024. Synopses, in italics, are from Letterboxd. Films are listed in no particular order:

Dahomey (Mati Diop)
Thousands of royal artifacts of Dahomey, a West African kingdom, were taken by French colonists in the 19th century for collection and display in Paris. Centuries later, a fraction returned to their home in modern-day Benin. This dramatized documentary follows the journey of 26 of the treasures as told by cultural art historians, embattled university students, and one of the repatriated statues himself.
Dahomey is a mesmerising experiment, both visually and thematically: it poses so many questions about decolonisation, essentialism, the traces in the present left by the actions in the past, language, art, religious practices, politics, and the life of objects (Object Oriented Onthology?), while hinting at possible lines of flight…Diop has an incredible talent in capturing the beauty of people and things, and blend them together…
“I am the face of the metamorphosis”

Knit’s Island (Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, Quentin L’helgoualc’h)
Somewhere on the internet is a land where communities pretend to live out a survivalist fiction. The avatars of the directors of Knit’s Island spent 963 hours there, creating a fascinating film resulting from their encounter with these communities. The “players” reveal their fears and fantasies, in an at times unsettling blurring of the real and the virtual.
I am not a gamer, and not particularly interested in online videogames, but when I first saw it at the Niigata International Animation Film Festival, it blew my mind. The reality of the virtual, complex, subtle, and much much more.

No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal)
Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, this documentary shows the destruction of the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities and the unlikely friendship that blossoms between Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham.


The Voices Of The Silenced (Park Maeui, Pak Su-nam)
Director Park Soo-nam, a second-generation Korean resident in Japan who is losing his eyesight, decides to digitally restore 16mm film she shot a long time ago, relying on her daughter Park Ma-eui’s eyesight. The blood, tears, and numerous corpses of Koreans living in Japan are clearly engraved in the film filmed over 50 years.

Hiroshima – Nagasaki (Ikezoe Shun)
Voices from Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, who was twice exposed to the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and later became a storyteller, as well as those who continue the storyteller activities with his daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and other people who were twice exposed to the atomic bombs. How will a storyteller who was not involved in the story pass on the memories in the future?

Clouds of War (Mikami Chie)
This is the latest documentary by journalist and filmmaker Mikami Chie, a director whose previous works (The Targeted Village, Boy Soldiers: the Secret War in Okinawa, We Shall Overcome) have focused on the current situation in the Ryūkyū archipelago (Okinawa), its complex geopolitical history and the resistance of its people against the various American bases operating on the islands. Filmed over the course of eight years, beginning in 2015, Clouds of War documents the construction of military harbours and ammunition depots by the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, and more broadly, the general militarisation of the main island of Okinawa, Yonaguni, Miyako and Ishigaki. These frightening changes affecting the land and its citizens, such as the construction of underground shelters in Yoneguni or a plan to evacuate the inhabitants to Kyūshū, are being done in preparation for the next war on the horizon, the one between China and Taiwan.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (Johan Grimonprez)
In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.

The Oasis I Deserve (Inès Sieulle)
Replika is a public platform that allows anyone to create a relationship with a chatbot trained by artificial intelligence. This chatbot has been designed to replace us with our loved ones after our death. Thus, its goal is to learn as much as possible about us in order to reproduce us identically. Through a walk that takes place only from the subjective point of view of Replikas, we see them evolve and discover the images & sounds of the world around them through a system of videos generated by artificial intelligence. Phone conversations that Replikas have with users fill the narration. The Oasis I Deserve is not a film that questions the system of machine/human domination under the axis of a future war against the machine. It is a film that is mainly human. It speaks about our relationship to the unknown and how we share violence. (source).
I was really impressed by the subject tackled and by the way the images, Francis Bacon like, are able to convey the themes and the feelings explored .

Black Box Diaries (Itō Shiori)
Journalist Shiori Itō embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems.
A powerful example of how women can reclaim their agency through the visual medium.

Underground (Oda Kaori)
The latest work by the Japanese artist, I have written about it, here: Sculpting space with light.


Discoveries:

Mother of Many Children (Alanis Obomsawin, 1977)
This film is an album of Native womanhood, portraying a proud matriarchal society that for centuries has been pressured to adopt different standards and customs. All of the women featured share a belief in the importance of tradition as a source of strength in the face of change.
Obomasawin’s first feature-length documentary is also one of her best (along with Kanehsatake and Restigouche, in my opinion): insightful, touching, multi-layered and beautifully constructed.

Echigo Okumiomote: A Traditional Mountain Village (Himeda Tadayoshi, 1984)
I wrote an article about the film: here.

A Grasscutter’s Tale (Fukuda Katsuhiko, 1985)
Part of the Sanrizuka notes that Fukuda took after he left Ogawa Pro in the late 1970s and the group moved to Yamagata, A Grasscutter’s Tale is a crucial film in the history and development of documentary practices in Japan. It occupies two spaces at once: a militant cinema and a cinema that explores the waves of history through the personal; in other words, it’s an oral film that uses images to explore the physical and historical space of a place.
Fukuda experiments with style and form, for example: one segment about a dream is completely dark except for a bright light in the top left corner of the screen, and in another, the narration explains, again on a black screen, how the re-enactment of an episode from the old lady’s life was scrapped at the request of her son, who was in it.
The episodic structure of the film, which is made up of 19 chapters (some comic, some tragic) that explore episodes in the life of the protagonist, does not capture a totality, but provides an image that leaves room for the creation of meanings. This is also reflected in the visual style used, where images and words are parallel and do not touch each other, so to speak.
I was lucky enough to attend a screening of the documentary in 16mm, the greens of the crops and grass are almost tactile, and the time-lapse scene of the setting sun, here a fiery red, is similar to that used in Magino Village: A Tale.

addendum (January 5, 2024): I forgot Tokyo Trial (Kobayashi Masaki, 1983), one of the fews examples of found footage/compilation documentary in the history of Japanese cinema.

Sculpting space with light: Underground (Oda Kaori, 2024)

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. 

Saving a Dragonfly (Hong Daye, 2022)

warning: this article includes suicide-related content

Throughout our lives, we have been constantly reminded that we would transform into butterflies as we become adults. We were led to believe that adolescence was merely a pupal stage, where all our dreams and hopes would take flight upon metamorphosis. However, my friends and I didn’t quite experience that butterfly-like transformation. Instead, we found ourselves undergoing a different kind of growth, akin to a dragonfly that, unlike the complete metamorphosis of a butterfly, only changes in size as it matures.
Hong Daye

I’m usually not a fan of personal documentaries, although I’ve often written about this “mode” of non-fiction, especially in regard to the Japanese documentary landscape (e.g. here). That being said, occasionally there are exceptions that grab my attention, Saving a Dragonfly by South Korean director Hong Daye is one of these. I missed it last year when it was screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, but thanks to the Taiwan IDF: 2024 on Tour, I had the chance to catch up with it. 

The film is a visual diary of sorts, filmed by director Hong over six years, from her last years in high school, to her time in college, depicting her struggles, and those of her friends, in trying to navigate life in a society, South Korea, where entrance tests, and the college admission system, are treated as a matter of life and death. As far as I know, South Korea and Japan are the only two countries where the obsession for tests and entrance exams, originally a device used to solve the problem of huge classes in the postwar period, at least in the archipelago, is an integral part of what society demands from young people. This obsession ends up shaping the lives of the young generations and their families, from the time spent studying at night at cram schools almost daily, to the financial burden these schools often represent for the students’ families, resulting in debts, extra jobs, and occupation changes.

The documentary shows very clearly how this pressure, and the consequent fear of failure and judgment, is internalized by the young girls, pushing them, in the most extreme cases, towards attempts to commit suicide. The matter-of-fact tone in which some of the high school girls talk about the feeling of being worthless and abandoned after failing the CSAT (College Scholastic Ability Test), is spine-chilling. As the director comments in the film, in the final years at high school, the lives of the girls feel like a chrysalis to be crushed and consumed in order to become a dragonfly, the life after high school. However, oftentimes from this chrysalis no dragonfly is born, and young lives are sadly lost, hence the title. 

Death and the shadow of suicide, of friends and of the director herself, permeate the whole film, and I don’t think it’s only a consequence of the Korean school system, while the pressure is undoubtedly there. At one point in the film, Hong confesses that she tried to cut her wrists a couple of times—towards the end we even see the cuts on her arm—feeling insecure, almost an act to “confirm her own worth”, this happened even once she finally entered university after retaking the exam. 

While the first part of the documentary is composed of shots taken in 2014, during the last year of high school and just before the CSAT, the second half depicts the life of the director and her friends in university from 2016 to 2020. In this section there are more and longer descriptions of her own attempts to take her life, never overly dramatized, one of the qualities of the documentary. The gloomy feeling of not belonging is thus still there, even when the world outside moves on, for instance, we see briefly on screen protests on the streets, probably those of the so-called Candlelight Demonstrations (2016-2017), alternated with images of Hong and her friends curled up on a sofa. A hint of communality and purpose, on the one hand, solitude and aimlessness, on the other. In this part, the documentary is more an exploration of the existential crises the director went through at that stage of her life: the difficulties in connecting with her friends, and more broadly finding a way in life. Yet, at the core of it, at least this is my reading, there’s still that sense of failure and not living up to expectations instigated by the school system. 

One of the most heartwrenching scenes in the film is when Hong and her parents recollect her suicide attempt on a bridge, the three of them are in a car and at one point her mother bursts into tears—we cannot see her face, the camera is on the back seat with the director. For a brief moment we have a glimpse of her relationship with her parents and of their feelings towards their daughter. The use of a moving car to elicit confessions or straightforward talk between people seems to be a tendency in the world of non-fiction, I’ve seen at least a couple of documentaries recently that employ this narrative device.

Saving a Dragonfly ends with some of her friends, now in their mid twenties, being interviewed by Hong, remembering and reflecting about their young years and the filming process they were part of, including sorrowful remembrance of a friend who took her life.  This for me was probably the weaker segment of the film, I much preferred the spontaneity and directness of the images and sounds that came before, to the reflection a posteriori of what happened and was filmed five years prior. 
In this regard, the aesthetics of the film reflect this difference: while the images of the parts filmed in high school, compared to the more polished ones shot at the time of college and after, might be, and indeed are, more “amateurish” and shaky, they are nonetheless more powerful and affective in their rawness. What particularly works here are the several moments of poetic truth scattered throughout the film, never overblown, and always expressed as a matter-of-fact, also through a lean editing. One that, for me, summarizes the documentary particularly well is this exchange between the director and a friend, on images of the blue sky over the city:

“I don’t get the colors right”

“It’s fine as long as the sky is beautiful” 

“It doesn’t look like our future”

Two scenes in Sanrizuka – Heta Village 三里塚 辺田部落 (Ogawa Production, 1973)

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.

Bibliography:


Mellen Joan. The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan through its Cinema. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976, quoted in
Of Time and Struggle, Four films by Ogawa Productions, Courtisane Film Festival, 2017.

Nornes Abé Mark. Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese
Documentary. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.