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!
Asian Docs 