An accurate film, accomplished in every aspect, that works with the characters in a transparent and radical way, taking the dramaturgy and the connection with the soul of the protagonist to the extreme. Getting inserted in the center of a family drama, it transforms the characters into very cherished beings. The film reveals a very gifted director in her feature film debut.
“Salmon fight the stream to return to their birth location, to renew life. But if the river gets sold, the fish will jump ashore to her death . . .”—This is a quote from one of the protagonists of this incredibly powerful film, which serves as a metaphor on the condition of exile. The film speaks metaphorically about khaki, as a color, uniform, and as a symbol of oppression, in societies all over the world.
A gaze is enough to reveal one’s thoughts and emotions—even without words or behavior. This holds true not only for what one looks at, but what one hears. For example, one’s mind is reflected in how and which sounds of the cacophony of the external world are heard. In this film, each precise shot and the skillfully constructed sound design modestly but exquisitely achieves this end. Subsequently, the film reaches a deep introspection on the fundamental solitude of humankind.
I Am Not Your Negro is a seminal film which will endure long beyond the acclaim of the day. We recognize it for its passion and eloquence, for its articulate argumentation, for its extraordinarily sourced material, and for the elegance of its anger.
A complex and beautiful film that builds a world of associations from the images, which makes us relive and at the same time think about the moments of history. Without having filmed a single image, the film is the sewing of materials that move from intimacy to the facts of history, generating in the viewer the pleasure and work of looking, re-watching, thinking, after the workers leave the factory.
［General Comment：Ignacio Agüero］
Dear all, for me it is very significant and exciting to be here for the fourth time, including the first version of 1989, when my film One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train was the first film projected in the first international competition of this festival.
From then on, thousands of documentaries have been screened in this beautiful city, which has become so familiar to me.
Jury member Shichiri Kei said, in his juror statement, that he would likely be tossed about at Yamagata like a small ship in the vast ocean of stimulating documentaries, exhausted.
Like Kei, for the past several days we were all submerged in this fantastic vast ocean, navigating amidst documentary films about history and identity, politics and conflict, migration and exile, and a range of films about intimate memories, about dissolving the self, about the ghosts of memory, and about the beauty of passing time. We were tossed about from the shore of Hadenya to Calabria then to the Bronx and back again to Asia, from Wuhan and Ninh Hoa to Gujarat and Subic, from Río de Janeiro to Prague. The imagery varied from beautiful to disturbing, the methods ranged from longitudinal engagement to reenactment, the camerawork was sometimes static and sometimes relentlessly fluid, all backed by extensive and meticulous research of archival footage and cinematic quotations.
For us on the jury it was a fascinating five days journey—exhausting but equally satisfying. The perennial issues of who is entitled to speak for whom and what is the essence of documentary kept popping up in our own discussions, and we had the chance to rehearse all over again our arguments against the background of an amazingly thought-provoking and democratically-compiled program in which first time filmmakers rubbed shoulders with venerable veterans.
For the three decades of its existence, the Yamagata International Documentary Festival has established itself as the most authoritative festival of this kind in Asia. It works to highest standards and enjoys tremendous reputation among the global community of documentarians.
We are immensely impressed:
– with the elaborate and careful selection process,
– with the utmost professionalism of curatorial choices,
– with the most attentive and engaged audience,
– with the most competent translators
– with the technical high quality of the screenings, including the turning off of the annoying security lights
– and with the warm and generous disposition of staff and volunteers.
Producing this festival is a veritable community effort. So, as far as we are concerned, the festival, which is recognized worldwide, has already put Yamagata on the world map as a creative city, with or without UNESCO’s stamp of approval.
It was an enriching and fulfilling experience for all of us. ARIGATOGOZAIMASU.
In encouraging the spirit of resistance and allowing idealistic young people to voice out their concerns about current events, bravely standing in the line of fire to confront the forces of suppression and indifference, in order to create a just, free, and more tolerant society, the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize is awarded to Yellowing, by Chan Tze-Woon.
Patiently immersing himself in the day-to-day existence of society’s homeless underclass, and highlighting key emotional moments to show their humanity despite the misery of their lives, in order to create empathy for them, the Award for Excellence goes to The Slice Room, by Song Yun-hyeok.
Filming in difficult terrain that’s undergoing political strife, but overcoming barriers of racial enmity, language and cultural divide to produce a wonderful symphony of a happy people and their way of life, the Award of Excellence goes to Up Down & Sideways, by Anushka Meenakshi and Iswar Srikumar.
By creating a kinetic rush with its energetic splash of multi-media visuals, sound effects, pop graphics and animation, and approaching documentary with a strong dose of fun and levity, the Special Mention award goes to Bamseon Pirates, Seoul Inferno, by Jung Yoon-suk.
By undertaking a personal journey to explore the story of his brother, the filmmaker discovers personal truths about himself and his family. As the beneficiary of his brother’s sacrifices, he has become the jade treasure in his family. The Special Mention award goes to City of Jade, by Midi Z.
［General Comment］
Congratulations to all the 21 filmmakers. All of you are already winners, having bested about 700 titles that were submitted to the New Asian Currents section of YIDFF 2017. Documentary filmmaking has greatly evolved since the time of pioneers like Robert Flaherty and Joris Ivens. In the past days, we the jury members saw a whole wide range of documentary forms: from the observational to the re-enacted; from the realistic to the fantastic; from the factual to the poetic, which used a vast array of techniques: Talking heads, found footages, non-linear montage, sound art, and long takes.
But let’s get to the point. The world has changed greatly in the past year and a half. In these times of fake news, alternative facts, and encroaching authoritarianism, we need the power of truth to counter these disturbing developments. We think documentary should play its vital role in depicting these truths by going back to basics, and deal with reality head-on, with minimal artifice as much as possible. But in doing so, let us not forget the most important ingredient in what good documentary should convey—the human condition.
At the 1st Yamagata Film Festival in 1989, I had met and talked with the filmmaker Ogawa Shinsuke, who inspired me with his passion for cinema, and dedication to filming the truth about Japanese peoples’ lives. He also talked about new ideas and innovations in making documentaries. He was the beacon of light that guided the Yamagata Film Festival from its inception until now, 28 years later. May his spirit shine on and live on in all of you filmmakers who are inside this hall tonight.
From the beginnings with Robert Flaherty, visual anthropology was at the root of documentary film, but in our world today that is riven by serious ethnic and religious confrontation and conflict, the dangers associated with this genre have increased, as has the importance of the work.
In this film, made in the Nagaland state in India, where there is a history of cruel warfare and where conflict continues to this day, the bonds of people in the village are bolstered by cooperative labor and group singing, giving strength to communal society.
The film gives us the opportunity to experience life in the village and the rhythms of song. The filmmakers’ talents are displayed in the composition of every single frame of the film, their carefully measured distance from the subjects, the intelligence of the editing and the richness of the sound.
It is very rare to encounter a film that begins with the sound of laughter and ends with the sound of laughter.
This film not only expands the possibilities of film, it expands our possibilities as human beings.
For four days during YIDFF, the members of the Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop discuss films screened at the festival and ways of writing about them critically. The following notes are based on a discussion among workshop participants Becca Voelcker (BV), Quyen Nguyen (QN), Chanon Praepipatmongkol (CP), and Joel Neville Anderson (JNA). The discussion was guided by mentor Chris Fujiwara.
BV: In some senses, Another Year is a chamber piece. Set entirely within two rooms, it observes thirteen dinners shared by a family over fourteen months. But these two small rooms are geographically separate. One is in urban Wuhan, and the other is in the countryside. From one, we hear trains; chickens and dogs wander into the other. Each meal is bookmarked with a title card indicating the month, and the static camera is positioned differently each time. Gradually, as the year and film progress, we come to understand that the father and eldest daughter work in the city. The mother remains in the countryside with two younger children and the grandmother, who has suffered a stroke. The family are “migrant workers,” a term for people in China who have rural household registrations but work in cities.
Through oblique references to the lack of welfare support for such migrants, disclosed in mealtime conversations about income, sickness and childbearing, the precarity of the family’s situation becomes clear. But the rate of disclosure is deliberate. An old neighbour drops in on the family, and sits in the corner of the room, knitting. Having grown up in Wuhan herself, Zhu is akin to this neighbour, knitting a family portrait from behind the camera. Reminiscent of Chantal Akerman’s poised observations of her mother’s kitchen table (No Home Movie) or Russian living rooms (From the East), Zhu watches the three-generation family with close attention. The film’s slow pace allows us to notice things. The father’s hair grows longer in the winter. The daughter, mother and grandmother quarrel. The dumplings are saltier one time, and stuffed too full another.
Zhu’s background in photography and visual art is apparent in Another Year’s meticulously framed compositions, whose depth of field and plays of light recall Vermeer. Equally poised are her cuts, delineated with sound bridges and fades to black. Such formality and control contrast the wandering family conversations, unresolved spats, leftover congee, and repeated concerns (the grandmother is still frail, the father still swigs beer from the bottle). Another year passes.
Framing the arbitrary and ordinary gives them voice. It also foregrounds the film, its maker and audience as listening and looking neighbours. Jean-Luc Nancy calls this kind of relation one of “being-with.” “Being-with” this family, Zhu brings us into a community prefaced less on identification than patient regard. She prompts us to consider the conditions for our experience of this family. What escapes spatial and temporal selection? What can and cannot be understood?
QN: Meals, as this film shows, aren’t merely about the mechanical act of consuming food. Meals are where familial tension unfolds. Members of the family often scream at each other at the table. The mother, in her mild cruelty, calls the grandmother stupid for the latter’s incapacity to reach for water in an efficient manner. The teenage daughter runs away from the table, and from the kitchen, off frame, we hear her tearful shout about not wanting to quit school for work. The father impatiently asks his five-year-old girl to stop messing with the mahjong pieces, his prized source of comfort besides the habit of constantly downing beer. The kids often fight over toys, the TV antenna, plastic cups of Fanta, the endlessly petty and adorable things children are caught up in. These altercations accumulate, month by month, and become heavier with the weight of destitution despite the light nature of so-called family bickering.
But meals are also where filial piety emerges, albeit disguised behind the normalized squabbles of the family. Though treated disturbingly like an unwanted dog, the grandmother is still kept around the house. The teenage daughter doesn’t think too highly of either of her parents, but she helps them out around the house anyway, and perhaps will quit school to get a job. This is a culture that dictates children to take care of or answer to their parents even when the relationship has been divested of affection. Filial piety is complicated in Asian society: a silently aggressive mixture of responsibility, resentment and pity directed towards one’s ancestors.
The redeeming part, not that there has to be one in a documentary or story, is the unwavering presence of care at the table. It is only directed at the youngest boy in the household, perhaps because he is still blameless and the other members of the family derive pleasure from feeding him, playing with him, teasing him, doting on him, showing him their tender side. At some point in the film, the teenage daughter loses it and asks the mother why she decided to bring so many children into this life of eternal irritation and misery. The question of course should have been addressed to both parents, especially the father who, despite his masculine reticence, seems to be the one who makes the calls in the household. But perhaps, now that the children all have to face the human trouble of being born, the more pressing question is how to nourish them. It is not only rice, congee or noodles, which the mother persistently makes on the daily, but another sustenance that makes the young boy in the family such a joyful angel to look at: his mother’s love and kindness, those two clichéd things that might be the healing balm of many woes.
Another Year ends with a New Year’s mini-feast, a happy gathering, where pork, soda and nice clothes appear. Behind the usual wrangling among the children, the moody quietness of the father, the ignored mumbles of the grandmother and the non-stop hustling of the mother, it is hard to see but there might be indeed traces – even stained ones like those signs of grit and wear on the wall – of love, manifest in the attention paid to the young boy or the gentle way the teenage daughter walks her grandmother to bed. It is in these small fleeting moments of compassion that family ties seem bearable and even pleasurable despite their occasional asphyxiations.
CP:Another Year announces itself as a structuralist experiment centered around the unit of the meal. The film observes the same Wuhanese family at the dining table over the course of a year. Intertitles bookending the meals introduce mark the passage of time. Another cut, another month, another dinner conversation. This simple structure, however, belies the suggestion that the meal might be a less discrete unit than initially presumed. We behold a group of six people across three generations, who while gathered in the same space, at the same time attempt to sustain private worlds of their own. Often, the act of eating often happens alongside – and despite – other activities: the little boy is tumbling back and forth on the bed; his sisters gather at the table, fixated on a TV soap opera, while mother passes them meat; father, beer in hand, tunes out from the ruckus; grandmother sits, simply there. In other moments, conversations unfold in a state of inattention: an observation made or a question asked, only to be met with a response much later. What we behold is not the meal as a coherent event per se, but rather moments when we are allowed to observe their being-together as much as their being-apart within the same room. It is in this sense that Another Year raises compelling questions about family life as a spatial drama. To what extent does being a family on the margins of urban Chinese society mean learning to manage the intimate, even claustrophobic, proximity of the studio apartment setting? How does this space structure the possibilities of care as well as alienation? How does the meal, as a moment of daily convergence, actualize a truly shared and communal space?
JNA: Thirteen meals over one year depicted in as many shots over the course of three hours. Relayed in these terms, Zhu Shengze’s Another Year might sound a cold examination of ritual meal preparation and consumption. Upon experience, however, as the intricately composed shots follow one another sandwiched between black leader and bilingual (Chinese/English) title cards announcing the month, the familiarly haphazard conditions of domestic meal consumption offer a wealth of patterns and variations within the film’s rigid stricture. It’s in these patterns that family dramas play out large and small: a stroke and a slow recovery, a story of glasses broken at school that don’t appear replaced for months, graying hair inexplicably rejuvenated.
Between the wandering toddler son, moody elder daughter, quiet middle daughter, ailing grandmother, vigilant mother, and comparatively quiet father, all the members of the family are seldom sitting at the table at the same moment. And in fact often they aren’t always in the same location, forced as they are to divide time between the city of Wuhan offering work, and their rural hometown where the grandmother can rest. Switching between these two locales, the film boasts unique access to their quotidian life to the point where if it were not for the occasional glance to the camera or address to the camerawoman, one might suspect it to be hidden away, often placed near a television drawing intermittent attention from the intermittent diners.
Aside from the final shot, not one composition is repeated, and Another Year’s camera frames each picture as a beautiful and unique cross-section of an exceptionally small domicile. It is in this perfection of each frame, often furnished and arranged (whether by the family or the filmmaker) to properly orient the viewer – such as including a calendar or family photo in view – that the film’s formalism could be perceived as threatening its ethical engagement with its subject. How for instance, does the dirt smudging the walls (beautiful as it is appearing on digital video), serve the film differently from the family in the moment when an elder sibling is stopped from patting dust from the coat of the toddler, who has rubbed his thick coat against the wall, for this dust will blow into the air, and into the food. This question of access and class is, however, partially answered by the other formality of orientation around subject and filmmaker: that of an invitation to dinner extended and accepted, however the mechanics of its extra-cinematic negotiations transpired, as the film’s sustained engagement with the actions around eating makes worthwhile.
Teddy Co (THE PHILIPPINES / Film historian, archivist)／Shiozaki Toshiko (JAPAN / Filmmaker)
Bamseom Pirates, Seoul Inferno Director: Jung Yoon-suk / KOREA / 2017 / 119 min
Through their music, grindcore duo Bamseom Pirates puts the spotlight on South Korea’s social issues, giving a voice to the angst felt by the young people in South Korean society today. But one day in 2012, their close friend and producer is arrested on suspicion of violating the National Security Law . . . .
Caro Mio Ben (My Dear Beloved) Directors: Su Qing, Mina / CHINA, SINGAPORE / 2017 / 118 min
Directors Su Qing and Mina (White Tower, YIDFF 2005 New Asian Currents) capture the vacillating and evolving emotions of girls reaching adolescence, as they go about their daily routines at a school for students with hearing and vision disabilities.
City of Jade Director: Midi Z / TAIWAN, MYANMAR / 2016 / 99 min
The filmmaker’s brother and his friends mine for jade as the conflict between the government’s armed forces and the Kachin Independence Army continues. The director’s monologue reveals the relationship between him and his parents, as the camera closes in on what is happening at the mining site.
Droga! Director: Miko Revereza / USA, THE PHILIPPINES / 2014 / 8 min
A mix of American culture and the Tagalog language, this film is one proof of the existence of Filipinos living in the U.S. We look into the director’s mind, etched onto Super 8 film.
Disintegration 93-96 Director: Miko Revereza / USA, THE PHILIPPINES / 2017 / 6 min
Home videos taken in the 1990s, when the director and his family emigrated from the Philippines to Los Angeles, that ooze with unease and longing for home—and now. The “un-integrated” U.S.—on film, full speed ahead.
The Beginning of Creation: Abduction / A Child Director: Yamashiro Chikako / JAPAN / 2015 / 18 min
Dancer Kawaguchi Takao reenacts a legendary performance by the late dancer, Ohno Kazuo. The filmmaker’s gaze clings to the exposed body, looming larger than life itself.
A Woman of the Butcher Shop Director: Yamashiro Chikako / JAPAN / 2016 / 27 min
A woman chops up blocks of meat that have washed up on a shore that has been spared development because of the presence of a U.S. military base. Men flock to the meat she sells. The film—which switches back and forth between reality and fiction—portrays the state of Okinawa today.
In Memory of the Chinatown Director: Chen Chun-Tien / TAIWAN / 2016 / 30 min
Tainan City’s so-called “Chinatown,” once a bustling residential and commercial complex, is about to be torn down to make way for redevelopment. The breath of the now deserted facility can be felt resonating with the memories of its former residents.
The Slice Room Director: Song Yun-hyeok / KOREA / 2016 / 69 min
Redevelopment threatens the survival of the low-income housing projects known as jjok bang. Living in a jjok bang himself, the director reveals the shortcomings and hypocrisy of the South Korean welfare system.
On to the Next Step: Lives After 3.11 Director: Tashiro Yoko / JAPAN / 2015 / 180 min
For two years after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, this film painstakingly follows Yamada Farm in the Hokkaido town of Onuma, a bakery on the banks of the Toya Lake, and a fishing community in Oma, Aomori—a town on the shore opposite Onuma—all beleaguered by anxiety and fear over a nuclear power plant under construction nearby.
Nokas Director: Manuel Alberto Maia / INDONESIA / 2016 / 76 min
In Kupang, West Timor, dowries and other traditions threaten to interfere with a marriage between Nokas and his beloved. But with the support of his strong older sister and mother, he is inspired to go forward with his plans to marry.
Of Cats, Dogs, Farm Animals and Sashimi Director: Perry Dizon / THE PHILIPPINES / 2015 / 78 min
The camera captures the life of Dondon, a boy who agonizes over his family and his future, as he grows up transient, moving from one rubber plantation to another.
Rubber Coated Steel Director: Lawrence Abu Hamdan / LEBANON, GERMANY / 2017 / 19 min
It is 2014, and two unarmed Palestinian youth are shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. What emerges from records of the trial—which hinged on the kind of bullets used, and audio analysis of the gunshots—is silence.
Hurrahh! Director: Jung Jae-hoon / KOREA / 2011 / 75 min
The individual nature of any given human body erodes little by little, even while simultaneously seeking the right moment to overflow. This film portrays one man’s life as he goes back and forth between home and work: a certain uneasiness infiltrates everything, and somewhere, we hear the echoes of a scream.
Self Portrait: Birth in 47 KM Director: Zhang Mengqi / CHINA / 2016 / 102 min
Directed by Zhang Mengqi (Self-Portrait with Three Women, YIDFF 2011 New Asian Currents), this work incorporates performance, and features two women: one elderly and hunchbacked, veteran of a difficult life; and the other, her granddaughter.
What does the outside world look like to girls greeting the New Year at a rehabilitation facility for youth who have committed crimes? Directed by Mehrdad Oskouei (My Mother’s Home, Lagoon, YIDFF 2001 New Asian Currents).
This Little Father Obsession Director: Selim Mourad / LEBANON / 2016 / 103 min
Using beauty and humor, director Selim Mourad (A Trip to the Barbershop, YIDFF 2011 New Asian Currents)—as a gay person who cannot sustain the family line—challenges the patriarchal tradition, and the views held by his father and his family.
Those Who Remain Director: Eliane Raheb / LEBANON, UAE / 2016 / 95 min
From Eliane Raheb of This is Lebanon (YIDFF 2009 New Asian Currents), comes a story about a man running a restaurant in a village in northern Lebanon by the border with Syria, remaining, as the world changes around him.
Up Down & Sideways Directors: Anushka Meenakshi, Iswar Srikumar / INDIA / 2017 / 83 min
Songs ring out across the valley, sung by villagers at work together in Nagaland, India, near the border with Myanmar. The fields, love, friendship, and even bitter memories . . . they have always been accompanied by music.
A Yangtze Landscape Director: Xu Xin / CHINA / 2017 / 156 min
The camera travels the Yangtze River upstream from Shanghai to Yibin. As titles narrate the incidents that take place along the way, the lives of people living along the river are portrayed at a slow, cinematic pace against a changing landscape.
Yellowing Director: Chan Tze-Woon / HONG KONG / 2016 / 128 min
Taken from the viewpoint of the young people who participated in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, the film offers access to their happiness, anger, sadness, and joy—through their everyday conversations amid clashes with police.
New Asian Currents Special Invitation Films
A Filmless Festival Director: Wang Wo / CHINA / 2015 / 80 min
The 11th Beijing Independent Film Festival, scheduled to take place in the Beijing suburb of Songzhuang in August 2014, was shut down by authorities the day before it was to begin. A record of the incident was put together using footage shot by directors and participants.
Cuts Director: Chairun Nissa / INDONESIA / 2016 / 70 min
The film follows a director (Edwin) and producer submitting their film Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly to the Censorship Board as required by the Indonesian law, documenting what is meant to be a closed-door process.
Another Year Director：Zhu Shengze / CHINA / 2016 / 181 min
180 overpowering minutes divided into thirteen months, showing a migrant worker’s family at dinner. The film documents a year in time itself, through which the breakneck changes in contemporary Chinese society may be glimpsed.
Calabria Director：Pierre-François Sauter / SWITZERLAND/ 2016 / 117 min
Two immigrant men working at a funeral home in Switzerland drive a hearse to Calabria, Italy to deliver a corpse. A lyrical paean to life emerges, woven out of their conversations about living, loving, and the people they meet on their journey.
Communion Director：Anna Zamecka / POLAND / 2016 / 72 min
A girl in Poland named Ola takes care of her alcoholic father and her 13-year-old younger brother who has autism. Seizing on the occasion of her brother’s Holy Communion, Ola devotes herself to bringing back their mother who has left home, and to reuniting the family. A record of a young soul facing up against the hardships of everyday life.
Donkeyote Director：Chico Pereira / SPAIN, GERMANY, UK / 2017 / 86 min
The 73-year-old Manuel decides to go on an epic journey of 2,200 km from Spain to the United States, with his beloved donkey and dog as his companions. A road movie that celebrates the life of a man trying to be free and true to himself, despite his advanced age.
Ex LibrisーThe New York Public Library Director：Frederick Wiseman / USA / 2016 / 205 min
The latest work by filmmaker Frederick Wiseman brings us into the world that is the New York Public Library. In documenting both the problems and trials of the library in the digital era, as well as the many people who converge in this place, a portrait of the contemporary United States emerges.
A House in Ninh Hoa Director：Philip Widmann / GERMANY / 2016 / 108 min
This house, in Ninh Hoa in southern Vietnam, holds the memory of a family torn apart and scattered by the Vietnam War. Vietnam and Germany, the past and the present, the living and the dead: all these worlds meet again in this house, spinning family tales that span three generations.
I Am Not Your Negro Director：Raoul Peck / USA, FRANCE, BELGIUM, SWITZERLAND / 2016 / 93 min
Based on an unfinished manuscript by the late author James Baldwin, this film depicts the tumultuous modern history of the African American people. Even now nature of discrimination emerges from the writer’s words, documentary footage, film clips, and music.
In The Intense Now Director：João Moreira Salles / BRAZIL / 2017 / 127 min
Examining the passion of the people in footage shot in China in 1966 and in Paris and Prague in 1968, this film questions both the relationship between historical spectacle and an individual’s life, and the meaning of these cinematic documents.
Lone Existence Director：Sha Qing / CHINA / 2016 / 77 min
A filmmaker who has not left his home or spoken to anyone in years. The only thing sustaining him is his desire to observe with his camera the existences of others that project his hidden self. A film by Sha Qing, director of Wellspring.
Machines Director：Rahul Jain / INDIA, GERMANY, FINLAND / 2016 / 75 min
A camera goes deep into a giant textile factory in India. It juxtaposes in vivid proximity an aesthetic beauty with the harsh reality of factory workers migrated from remote areas—including children—working under unjust labor conditions.
A Memory in Khaki Director：Alfoz Tanjour / QATAR / 2016 / 108 min
Four individuals relate their mixed feelings about their homeland of Syria. For some, it is a repressive world in the color of khaki, while for others it is a violent one stained in red. The filmmaker, also Syrian, shares memories of his homeland and his sorrow at losing it.
Sennan Asbestos Disaster Director：Hara Kazuo / JAPAN / 2017 / 215 min
This film is about a lawsuit seeking state compensation for asbestos-related damage in the Sennan area of Osaka. Filmmaker Hara Kazuo records the eight-year struggle of the plaintiffs and their lawyers. A dogged and dramatic depiction of their intense battle.
A Strange Love Affair with Ego Director：Ester Gould / THE NETHERLANDS / 2015 / 91 min
A woman with strong self-confidence who suffers from the ideal she projects on herself. The filmmaker, her younger sister, explores these feelings of her sister’s through the medium of other women. A personal essay that compellingly describes the difficulties people face living in our contemporary society.
Tremorings of Hope Director：Agatsuma Kazuki / JAPAN / 2017 / 146 min
Hadenya, in Miyagi Prefecture’s Minamisanriku, saw severe devastation from the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. This film articulates for us the hopes and doubts of the local people in tackling recovery, as we watch the process of reviving their oshishisama tradition. Directed by Agatsuma Kazuki, director of The People Living in Hadenya.
Wake（Subic） Director：John Gianvito / USA, THE PHILIPPINES / 2015 / 277 min
The grave pollution of the environment and adverse health effects faced by residents of the area around a former U.S. naval base in Luzon Island, the Philippines. In this 227-minute work that continues on from his previous film, Vapor Trail (Clark), John Gianvito is listening to the voices of the people.
Calls are open for applications to this year’s Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop, which will take place during YIDFF 2017. This project will provide training in complex thinking and incisive writing about documentary cinema, while offering immersion in the lively atmosphere of an international film festival.
Participants will attend screenings of films that have been selected from the YIDFF program to represent key issues in contemporary documentary cinema. Then, participants will take part in structured, in-depth discussions of these films, led by their mentor, a well-known film critic and programmer, and joined by guests from the world of documentary. These discussions will form the basis for the writing of essays for publication after the festival.
Participants from Southeast Asia will be sponsored to receive an invitation that includes air transportation to Tokyo, train transportation from Tokyo to Yamagata, festival accreditation, and accommodation in Yamagata for the period for the workshop. Applicants from other countries will be given festival accreditation in Yamagata for the period of the workshop.
Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop overview
［Dates］October 5th（Thu）-10th（Tue）
［Place］Yamagata Manabikan（Yamagata City）
［To apply, you］
Must be able to attend YIDFF 2017 from October 5th–10th
Must be able to write and engage in discussions in English
Must commit to writing a 3,000-word essay to be published by YIDFF in late October
［To apply］
Send an email including the details requested below to <filmcritics2017@gmail.com> no later than Sep. 1st (Fri).
Name
Age
Address
Phone number
E-mail address
Self-introduction (education and employment history, with emphasis on your writing experience and your involvement with cinema)
Sample of previous writing
Essay on the theme “Why I Want to Write about Documentary” (approximately 500 words)
［Result Notification］
Applicants will be notified of the result of their application by early September.
［Mentor］
Chris Fujiwara, film critic and programmer. Chris has written and edited several books on cinema and has contributed to numerous anthologies and journals. He was formerly Artistic Director of Edinburgh International Film Festival, and he has also developed film programs for Athenee Francais Cultural Center (Tokyo), Jeonju International Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Mar del Plata Film Festival, and other institutions. He has lectured on film aesthetics and film history at Tokyo University, Yale University, Temple University, Emerson College, Rhode Island School of Design, and elsewhere. He has organized or served as a mentor for film criticism workshops at YIDFF, the Berlinale, Melbourne International Film Festival, the International Film Festival of Kerala, and Salamindanaw Asian Film Festival.
Designed by Minemura Takumi, third-year student at the Tohoku University of Art and Design, it was selected out of 66 student works from the university’s graphic design department.
You will see this motif on our official website, the cover of the official catalog, tickets, and at venues.
A blog relaying the latest news throughout the film festival. While it covers newly added events and schedule changes, it’s also packed with fresh features like photo galleries capturing the ambiance of the venues, and reviews emerging from the critical workshops.
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