Screenings at the Yamagata Documentary Film Library present documentaries and movies rarely shown on television or in theaters, including works from the Film Library vaults.
YIDFF 2013 Opening Film 1962 / Japanese / B&W / 13 min
Produced and provided by Yamagata City
Newsreel No. 4 shows the completion of a railway construction project and the celebration of the first train running on the Senzan railway between Yamagata and Yamadera, grapes being harvested on the Akahage mountainside of Motosawa district, an invitation to a dance party by Zao’s skiing school to the head of Austria’s National Ski Academy, and a young man narrating how students at the Takinohira Branch School endure a severe winter.
1962 / Japanese / B&W / 11 min
Produced and provided by Yamagata City
Newsreel No. 7 introduces the Zao region’s tourism boom in 1962 with newly built roads connecting Yamagata and Miyagi prefectures, the surge of people driving on the new roads in November 1962, a newly constructed Zao Ropeway where, in the opening ceremony, monks in goblin masks take a cable car ride, and the sewer systems in Yamagata lagging behind sewers in Western countries, inspiring Yamagata’s 15-year sewage construction initiative which began in 1956.
1964 / Japanese / B&W / 14 min
Produced and provided by Yamagata City
From the 1950s, in order to make Yamagata less isolated from other regions of Japan, plans were made to create the Sasaya Tunnel by carving a hole through Sasaya Mountain. Through the eyes of inhabitants from Sekizawa, this filmstrip shows the importance of the completion of the tunnel for the facilitation of access to their community, which is situated on the mountain’s peaks.
Circa 1960 / Japanese / Color / 12 min Produced and provided by Yamagata City
The Sasaya Highway offers the shortest route from Yamagata to Sendai, but in the past it was a rugged mountain path. With the construction of the Sasaya Tunnel, trade routes from Shiogama’s Miyagi Prefecture (on the Pacific Ocean) to Sakata of Yamagata Prefecture (on the Sea of Japan) were connected. This scenic drive is also dotted with famous hot springs.
Production Year Unknown / Japanese / Color / 28 min Produced and provided by Yamagata City
This film introduces Yamagata City’s municipal housing, water system, waste facilities, animal slaughterhouses, hospitals, and orphanage. We see footage of the former glory of the Yamagata Saisei Hospital—now converted into a historic building. It is estimated that this film was produced in the early 1960s.
Sasaya Tunnel
[Venue]The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library(Yamagata Big Wing 3F)[Admission]Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free) [Presented by]YIDFF (NPO) [Contact]e-mail：info@yidff.jp(YIDFF Yamagata office)
Screenings at the Yamagata Documentary Film Library present documentaries and movies rarely shown on television or in theaters, including works from the Film Library vaults.
Losses to Be Expected 14:00- 18:45- (screens twice)
Losses to Be Expected
YIDFF ’93 International Competition Runner-Up Prize
Director: Ulrich Seidl / AUSTRIA / 1992 / 35mm / 118 min
●Notes
Winter 1992. A man, Czech, takes his clothes off and dances frantically with his emaciated body to the ratting tunes of music. Two Austrian women sit on a sofa chattering about their opulent menus. Sidles semi-documentary film begins and ends with these two scenes. In between evolves a private story: Sept, a widower, is looking for a new wife, not for the sake of love, but because the meals his wife once prepared and stored in the freezer are slowly running out.
Losses to Be Expected
The life of the villagers living on both sides of the former Iron Curtain is documented in tiny details and with great sensitivity. Parable-like elements are woven into this relationship between East and West, two worlds which are totally different, though geographically very near: affluence and consumption on one side, poverty and backwardness on the other. It is a melancholic portrait of the land and the isolation of the old generation and about “losses”: the loss of youth and love, the loss of the border and the homeland.
Losses to Be Expected
These feelings are emphasized through dark images; heavy clouds are hanging low in the sky throughout the film. The camera glides smoothly, in dance-like movements between indoor and outdoor scenes, constantly dissolving the boundaries between documentary and feature film. In spite of its stylishness and use of Mise-en-scene, the film is of extreme authenticity. It shows a reality stripped of its romantic veil, naked like the body of the dancing Czech.
Regula König
Source：YIDFF ’93 Official Catalog
Losses to Be Expected
●Director’s Statement
When we started shooting, the story I wanted to tell in this film was still a story with an uncertain ending.
The film focuses on the Austrian widower Sepp, who hopes to find a wife in the former East Bloc because he has heard that they can be had cheaper there; and on Paula, a widow, living in Czechía. In Sepp she gets to know a man who promises her a life in the wealthy West.
My original intention was to tell something through this private story about the living conditions on both sides of the border. But in the end the film turned out to be more than a film of topical interest. Its exclusive topic is not the conflict between East and West —poverty on the one side, prosperity on the other—but the things in life that are universally valid—unfulfilled love, loneliness, age and death.
I did not know whether the film would be more a documentary or a feature film. But a frontier crossing was premiere—and we had been shooting in these villages for several months—that their own provincial and therefore “uninteresting” life could serve as the material for a film.
Ulrich Seidl
Losses to Be Expected
[Venue]The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library(Yamagata Big Wing 3F)[Admission]Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free) [Presented by]YIDFF (NPO) [Contact]e-mail：info@yidff.jp(YIDFF Yamagata office)
Screenings at the Yamagata Documentary Film Library present documentaries and movies rarely shown on television or in theaters, including works from the Film Library vaults.
YIDFF 2017 New Asian Currents Award Special Mention
Director: Jung Yoon-suk / KOREA / 2017 / 119 min
●Notes
Jang Sung-gun and Kwon Long-man are the grind core duo Bamseom Pirates. The group puts the spotlight on South Korea’s social issues at shows performed at universities, on the street, in buildings set for demolition, and at a rally to commemorate the Juju Massacre. At the same time, this versatile and yet candid duo shouts out the angst felt by South Korean youth. The film, which merges with the songs of the band’s album Seoul Inferno, plays out like a road movie, full speed ahead at first; but one day in 2012, their close friend and producer is arrested on suspicion of violating the National Security Law….
Bamseom Pirates, Seoul Inferno
●Director’s Statement
In contrast to bands that regularly play at the hip clubs in Seoul, Bamseom Pirates have performed predominantly in marginalized venues such as deserted playgrounds, small local communities, sites of forced eviction, and anti-nuclear demonstrations in Japan. The film considers Bamseom Pirates’ Journey in the context of a South Korea divided between city and the countryside, and shadowed by a tendency to equate urban development with praise-worthy growth. At the same time, Bamseom’s concerts on Juju Island and in Japan were at the center of the politically controversial issues of energy, national security, and sovereignty in East Asia. Their journey reached its peak when Park Jung-geun, a friend and a producer of the Bamseom Pirates, was arrested and changed with violating the National Security Law. Once Park was arrested, my initial plan–to investigate South Korean youth culture by following the footsteps of the Bamseom Pirates–required a massive revision. The band’s debut album, Seoul Inferno, was used as evidence in the trial of Park Jung-geun, and Kwon appeared as witness.
On the Korean Peninsula, where the last remaining communist regime goes head to head with its capitalist brother, there is no middle ground. Even though the violence of undemocratic, repressive, and antagonistic Cold War ideology still resounds in the post-Cold War era, Park Jung-geun’s “Kim Jong-il Car Sex” tweet and Bamseom Pirates’ album “Seoul Inferno” act as bright red flags, opening doors to the post-post-Cold War era. Looking at the fragments left behind in our rigid contemporary society, I am trying to reassemble them into something new.
Jung Soon-suk
Bamseom Pirates, Seoul Inferno
[Venue]The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library(Yamagata Big Wing 3F)[Admission]Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free) [Presented by]YIDFF (NPO) [Contact]e-mail：info@yidff.jp(YIDFF Yamagata office)
First Encounter with Documentary: Screening organized by YIDFF Youth
YIDFF Youth has completed its first screening event named “First Encounter with Documentary.”
Kenta YOKOYAMA, intern at the festival office, has filed this report:
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On February 12 YIDFF Youth, high schoolers who helped run YIDFF 2017 last October, presented its own screening event at Yamagata Citizens’ Hall, hoping documentary films would get more familiar among young people like them.
For that reason they chose the following films to be shown:
Up Down & Sideways
Directors: Anushka Meenakshi, Iswar Srikumar / INDIA / 2017 / 83 min
YIDFF 2017 New Asian Currents: Awards of Excellence, Directors Guild of Japan Award
Yellowing
Director: Chan Tze-Woon / HONG KONG / 2016 / 128 min
YIDFF 2017 New Asian Currents: Ogawa Shinsuke Prize
Well, how did it go?
8:00 Venue Setup
After a short briefing, we got down to setting up the venue!
Heavy snow was hitting the city
University students also came to help YIDFF Youth
Theater was about to open! A YIDFF Youth member was giving a briefing
9:00 Theater Opens
The venue opened and the theater got crowded little by little.
Audience arrives one by one
10:00 Screening: Up Down & Sideways
After the introduction by YIDFF Youth, it’s time for the screening!
Songs echoes from valley to valley (Up Down & Sideways)
I learned songs are essential to the people in the film on any occasion, whenever they feel sad, pleased, or angry.
13:00 Presentation: On Yamagata Creative City of Film
After the lunch break, the second part began.
To our surprise, this professional-like presenter is in the first year of high school!
13:20 Director’s talk before the screening
Thankfully Chan Tze Woon came all the way from Hong Kong to join this YIDFF Youth screening
13:30 Screening: Yellowing
Yellowing depicts the Umbrella Movement and the daily lives of those involved
The film represents the young people striving to change the current situation with their own voice and actions, no matter the consequences waiting for them.
16:00 Penel Discussion and Q&A
YIDFF Youth asking the director what drove him to shoot YellowingChan Tze Woon answering the questionsReading out questions form the audience (The umbrella-shaped questionnaires are put up on the board)
16:40 Group Discussion
The audience shared and presented what they felt through the film.
Exchanging opinions among audience members of different agesDirector also participated
17:00 Closing
The audience and the director seemed to have a lot more to talk, but time has come to call it a day.
Seven main organizers from different schoolsWith the audienceChan Tze Woon + students and staff
Clearing up the venue, Chan Tze Woon and the students moved to a fish restaurant for a party.
Relaxing time after a hard work
Afterword
On February 12 I volunteered at the screening event organized by high school students. Some trains were out of service because of heavy snow from the day before and we were anxious it might discourage people from coming. In the end we had an audience of more than 120 (in total) for Up Down & Sideways and Yellowing.
The high schoolers, who participated in the YIDFF last year as volunteers, organized this event hoping that it would help the younger generation get more familiar with documentary films. I was helping YIDFF Youth run the event from stage setup to clearing up, but was also able to watch the films as part of the audience.
What impressed me on that day was above all Yellowing, which depicts the Hong Kong students fighting for democracy with strong passion in their hearts. That’s not only because those students and I are around the same age, but because the film made me think about whether I could express what I believe like them if I were in their place.
Questionnaires collected show there were more older people than teenagers or those in their twenties. Although YIDFF Youth tried several forms of PR, like putting up posters around the city, distributing flyers at schools and through SNS, that was not enough to gather an adequate number of high school students in the audience.
Holding such events regularly will increase high school or university students involved, however.
Speaking of myself, I remember watching a documentary film in a class as a junior-high student, but I had the impression that the film was difficult to understand and that documentary is exclusively for grown-ups.
Now several years have passed and I have discovered how interesting documentary is and I feel like watching more. You may well be confused while watching certain films, but there will be others that enchant you. I hope that you won’t reject documentary film because it seems difficult to understand, and that you find your own favorites.
Finally, I’d like to thank all the participants for coming to this screening. If you find documentary films enjoyable or feel like watching more, please come join the YIDFF 2019. Films from past YIDFFs are presented at Friday Theatre twice a month and everybody is welcome.
Written by Kenta YOKOYAMA (Tohoku University of Community Service and Science)
Supervised by YIDFF Yamagata Office
Screenings at the Yamagata Documentary Film Library present documentaries and movies rarely shown on television or in theaters, including works from the Film Library vaults.
Tightly shut windows, a deserted corridor, and unused furniture. This house in Ninh Hoa, in southern Vietnam, still holds the memory of the family that once used to live here, but has since been sundered by the Vietnam War. In fact there are two houses: one where a serene daily life marks time, as work continues in the rice paddies to the cooing of birds. And there is another, new house, as well. As if the spirits of the dead have been summoned, this family split between Germany and Vietnam is reunited at the two houses for the first time in a long time, and tries to gather fragments of the missing from old letters and photos, and through communication with spirits via a medium. A family tale spun from the collective memories of three generations.
A House in Ninh Hoa
●Director’s Statement
A House in Ninh Hoa shows a history of migration from the perspective of those who remained at home. Just like the vantage point, our constellation as author team is special: As a foreign body in the family ensemble, and likewise as a representative of the other life of their German relatives, together with Nguyễn Phương-Đan I cast a glance at the fragile transnational coexistence of his extended family. Not any less helpless than during my first visit in 2005, as I need constant language translation, but also as translator into the language of cinema.
With A House in Ninh Hoa, we are attempting a form of staging involving non-actors as an experimental approach in a documentary field: Together with the protagonists, we define the dramaturgy and framework of content, within which everyday life will be improvised in front of the camera. This makes it possible to extract the crux of everyday life and thereby also gradually bring the unvoiced or the implied parts of the family’s history into a comprehensible form. Necessarily, we forgo the peaks of dramaturgy–history rarely produces distinct waves on the water surface of family life. In the family house, time appears to be cyclical, hardly anything suggests a directness towards the past or the future.
The different forms of speech–daily dialogue, letters from another time, the written report of the quiet patriarch Ties, telephone conversations, and the official-socialist diction of the village radio–connect to a fragmented narration that deals with the evocative power of widely separated times, places and associated persons: 1975 and 2014, Ninh Hoa and Bonn, Vietnam and Germany, the world of the living and the world of the dead. Part of the trajectory of this potency: airplanes, mopeds, trains, letters, photographs, telephone calls, sacrificial offerings, dreams of and dialogue with the dead.
Philip Widmann
A House in Ninh Hoa
How to Behave
16:15-
How to Behave
YIDFF ’91 The Asia Program
Director : Tran Van Thuy / VIETNAM / 1986 / 45 min
●Notes
A documentary made in the tide of Vietnam’s own efforts at perestroika, this is ostensibly a film about civic behavior and personal morality. This surface theme masks the true intent of the filmmakers and that is to show the state of the country as it is–poor, director, Tran Van Thuy, believes that documentary filmmakers must reflect the true aspirations of the people. There is an intriguing scene in this film which captures this principle: as the filmmakers approach a brick factory, its owner rushes out cursing and threatening the crew: “I am sick of you film people…….you fabricate everything…….I dare you to show how we really live! Aren’t you ashamed of making it all up!” This scene alone is worth the price of entry.
Source：YIDFF ’91 Official Catalog
How to Behave
[Venue]The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library(Yamagata Big Wing 3F)[Admission]Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free) [Presented by]YIDFF (NPO) [Contact]e-mail：info@yidff.jp(YIDFF Yamagata office)
Screenings at the Yamagata Documentary Film Library present documentaries and movies rarely shown on television or in theaters, including works from the Film Library vaults.
For years he has lived behind a closes door, never leaving his home or talking to anyone. The only thing keeping him going is the will to scrutinize with his camera the lives of strangers, on whom his hidden, hiding self may be projected. Can he obtain spiritual freedom through the dreamlike images of these people going about their daily lives? As this film’s creator, director Sha Qing（Wellspring, YIDFF 2003） interrogates the very source of the act of observing others, and the self.
Lone Existence
●Director’s Statement
Twelve years ago, while preparing to make a new film, I felt deeply unsettled. Was I going to make a film documenting others again, while hiding my self? And if not, when it comes to expressing my self, what was considered appropriate? How could I prevent it from becoming just a portrayal of my personal life?
I started roaming around looking for clues. In the lens of the camera I began to observe the faces that had mesmerized me over the years. Their simple, wooden, almost naked, lives lay bare before me. In my imagination, I would enter their dark homes with them, trying to surmise what the bright moments in their lives that helped them get through their long days were. Because I never trusted language, or perhaps simply out of shyness, I had never really bothered to find out.
Six years later, I put together my observation of other people into a film. However, that unsettling feeling did not dissipate. This is why I felt my work was unfinished.
A few years later, I felt like I was hitting rock bottom. I had never felt like this. But that was precisely when life revealed its extraordinary power. I managed to come back from the brink and gain a new lease on life. I was filled with the courage and energy I had desired for so long.
As I began working on my film again, all those questions that had plagued me before and I had never really delved into began to resurface. And my awakening came as I began to look at the signs and words of encouragement left to us by philosophers and sages of the past. I finally realized that finding the self, together with the manifestation of the other, could make the desire to reveal the essence of life possible.
An autobiographical work from Herz Frank. Images guide us through the countries in which he worked, interspersed with fragments from his earlier films: births, autopsies, circumcisions, prisoners awaiting execution and other shocking themes. These culminate in scenes from the director’s own heart surgery. The earnestness with which he continues to confront “life” and “death,” using himself as the subject, vividly brings traces of his seventy-five-year journey to the surface.
FlashBack
●Director’s Statement
This is a confession in film, dedicated to all the cameramen whom I had the honor of working with, and whose one eye was dry and the other one—in tears. Each of the 400 shots in this film is a true document, together forming an imaginative weave of a dramatic plot, unique philosophy, personal world perception, and certainly, visual culture.
Flashback—born from the 1978 short film Ten Minutes Older. Cameraman Juris Podnieks and I shot this film in one take at the Puppet Theater. For ten minutes, uninterrupted, we were looking into the face of a little boy in the third row . . . . And in the half-dark of the theater hall we were watching the depths of the human soul reflected in this tremulous face. In 1999, I decided to return to this boy. What happened to this tremulous soul in real life, with real, not fairy-tale, good and evil?
The door to the new film was opened to me by the White Angel; the Black Angel was hiding behind it. My wife came down with a terminal disease, and I myself had to face a heart operation. I was on the verge of giving up everything. But the challenge of documentary filmmaking was stronger than me.
I turned the camera on myself, and I looked back . . . Flashback! I looked back at my films, at my life which, as it turned out, it was possible to prolong if the open heart was touched. I looked back at the sad destiny of my wife who had faded away in front of my eyes . . . at my tiny hometown Ludza in Latvia—a small town where I was born, where everything had begun. My mom was a dentist, and my dad was a photographer whose life dream was to make a film . . .
Herz Frank
[Venue]The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library(Yamagata Big Wing 3F)[Admission]Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free) [Presented by]YIDFF (NPO) [Contact]e-mail：info@yidff.jp(YIDFF Yamagata office)
Screenings at the Yamagata Documentary Film Library present documentaries and movies rarely shown on television or in theaters, including works from the Film Library vaults.
A record of the student uprising at the Takasaki College of Economics, an event that became a forerunner of the nationwide student rebellions of the late 1960s. Nepotism in entrance procedures, the city authorities’ regular intervention in the school administration, and the lack of student freedom were all injustices protested by the angry students. The school administration suppressed them with threats, intimidation, and even violence. When a few dozen students barricaded themselves in the student hall, Ogawa and his staff locked themselves up there with them, following their actions, discussions, and private moments with impressive close-ups. Ogawa was able to achieve such a feeling of unity with the students that he could say with confidence that “none of them hid anything from the camera.”
The Oppressed Students
[Venue]The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library(Yamagata Big Wing 3F)[Admission]Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free) [Presented by]YIDFF (NPO) [Contact]e-mail：info@yidff.jp(YIDFF Yamagata office)
Screenings at the Yamagata Documentary Film Library present documentaries and movies rarely shown on television or in theaters, including works from the Film Library vaults.
Dir: Ester Gould / THE NETHERLANDS / 2015 / 91 min
●Notes
The filmmaker has always been fascinated by her older sister Rowan and drawn to her unshakeable self-confidence. However, Rowan’s excessive self-esteem, narcissism, and attachment to her own idealized self-image gradually become destructive. In an attempt to understand her older sister’s overblown sense of self, the director traces the correspondence they have shared over the years. She also turns the camera on three other women who, despite the differences in their age and lifestyles, are also filled with self-confidence. She thrusts her way into their thoughts and reflects on what she finds. A personal essay on the value people of today increasingly place on leading showy lives intended to be envied, this work painstakingly examines the suffering in the gap between these supposedly ideal lives and reality, and the suffocating nature of contemporary social life.
A Strange Love Affair with Ego
●Director’s Statement
I never set out to make an “ego documentary.” But after my big, self-confident sister Rowan committed suicide in 2007, I felt a strong need to tell a story about self-love and the need to be seen and appreciated. I wanted to understand may own admiration–Rowan was my youth idol–and make a film about the balancing act of ego. How could my sister, who seemed to love herself so much, kill herself?
A Strange Love Affair with Ego began with my own soft spot for people with big egos. I’ve always surrounded myself with people who have impressive and outspoken personalities. This perspective, I figured, could shed a new light on the subject of narcissism, a concept that is so often described as a cultural and societal problem. But for me narcissism isn’t a theoretical problem, it’s a human dynamic that I kwow so well.
I set out to tell this story as a modern myth, a parable like Everyman. The myth of Narcissus is about the danger of too much self-love because in the end it’s lonely. “Parties won’t cover up the silence” are the last words of my film. It’s a sentence by Virginia Woolf, an author who–like my sister Rowan–felt torn between her hunger for intellectual inspiration and big city life on one hand, and inner peace and a sense of belonging on the other.
The perfect image that I had of my sister is–now I realise–a construction, a stubborn attempt to keep on dreaming. In the same way, the characters that represent my sister in this film are constructing their identities; they are “performing” their lives. My hope is that this film works as a mirror, inviting audiences to reflect on the fact that we are all–more or less–“needy narcissists.” It’s an attempt to understand our fascination for success, fame and the spotlights.
An Interview with Hara Kazuo on Sennan Asbestos Disaster
Joel Neville Anderson
Sennan Asbestos Disaster
With Sennan Asbestos Disaster (2017), iconoclastic filmmaker Hara Kazuo makes a return ten years in the making, following his previous The Many Faces of Chika (2005). At three hours and thirty five minutes (usually screened with a short intermission), the film has many apparent differences from the past breathless titles for which he became known beginning in the early 1970s. Focused on a strong central protagonist pursuing a radical goal, these works depended on sustained conflict and collaboration between filmmaker and subject, defining a model of filmmaking he would theorize as “action documentary.” In contrast, this latest work is an ensemble piece assembled over a long period of time.
Sennan Asbestos Disaster is focused on members of the Citizen Group for Sennan Asbestos Damage and their long legal battle that began with the filing of a lawsuit against the government in 2006 and went up to the Supreme Court. The Sennan district of the city of Osaka flourished thanks to the dense concentration of asbestos factories in the early twentieth century (hosting over 200 factories at its peak), despite the Japanese government’s knowledge of the material’s health risks through research conducted before the end of World War II. Many of those affected were workers migrating from the rural areas around Osaka, as well as ethnic Koreans living in Japan. Suffering from illnesses caused by inhaling the silicate mineral such as lung cancer, mesothelioma, and asbestosis, the plaintiffs and group members accuse the government of stunting regulation and prioritizing economic development over the well-being of vulnerable laborers and residents within range of the environmental toxin.
Part One presents victims’ stories and history leading up to the case, while Part Two features the long, escalating drama of the court case, as plaintiffs pass away and the government repeatedly appeals the increasingly narrow victories decided by judges. Part of the historical significance of this case, following past instances of citizens suing corporations for liability, is that the defendant is the government itself, as is made clear in the original Japanese title 『ニッポン国 VS 泉南石綿村』, or “Japan vs. the Sennan Asbestos Village.” The significant stakes of the case also open up Sennan Asbestos Disaster as a continuation of Hara’s longstanding political commitments and formal approaches. Hara’s model of personal documentary developed in an era of leftist documentary collectives and justifies the penetration of private lives as a means of counteracting the state’s colonization of the self. In Goodbye CP (1972), Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974), The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987), and A Dedicated Life (1994), Hara and his subjects collide personal and social realities of disability rights activism, queer self-determination, military imperialism, wartime atrocity, traumatic repetition, and public deception and mortality. Sennan Asbestos Disaster reveals a voraciously curious filmmaker attentive to how new political and material environments and relations of subjects should be met with new creative methodologies. Here, a group of average citizens holding the state responsible for exposure to a deadly industrialized mineral instigates a stirring exploration of the brutality of capital, colonialism, and the state. Having collapsed the personal and political, in depicting the slow violence of the disaster in Sennan, Hara’s camera now tracks a poison seeping from the environment into human bodies.
In October 2017, Sennan Asbestos Disaster had its World Premiere at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, where it was awarded the Citizens’ Prize by the popular vote of attendees, and saw its International Premiere at the Busan International Film Festival, where it received the BIFF Mecenat Award for documentaries. I caught up with Hara at both festivals, and sat down to talk with him in the Haeundae neighborhood of Busan prior to the film’s Tokyo Premiere at Tokyo FILMeX International Film Festival in November.
JOEL NEVILLE ANDERSON: When did you personally develop an interest in asbestos-related illness?
HARA KAZUO: There was a time when I was making a television program about a film director named Urayama Kirio with a Kansai TV producer that I knew. That program turned out well, so we were hoping to work together again. We talked several times about doing different subjects, but nothing really came about until the producer suggested, “Well, how about doing something on asbestos?” That was the first introduction to the topic, from that producer. At that time, I’d spent about ten years reassessing my own work, and felt that, after having made films about people who’d lived very extreme lifestyles, I was finding it difficult to find a new topic, a new subject, and a person to focus on with a similarly intense way of living. I was thinking that maybe people who lived like that in the Showa period are no longer accepted in the Heisei era, and values have changed so much that that kind of intense, ferocious way of living isn’t accepted anymore. I couldn’t find a subject that really appealed to me until the asbestos topic came around, and I just felt like I wanted to make something—anything—so I latched on to that, and didn’t want to worry about whether it was appropriate or not. I just wanted to make something. Of course, being a TV company, I was hoping they’d come up with a budget as well, which they did. So that enabled me to break out of that funk of trying to find a subject matter similar to the films that I’d worked on previously.
JNA: During the film’s premiere at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, the question was asked whether or not the subjects in the film ever had any misgivings about the project. You had so many of the subjects there as guests, so there were many different views, and it’s great you were able to give voice to them. One woman stood up and said she never really had any doubts, and then Mr. Yuoka [Kazuyoshi] stood up and said, “Of course I had doubts, this is the director of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On!” But in the end he seemed happy with the final product. I’m wondering how you gained the trust of your subjects, and whether or not trust is all that important.
HK: I’m not sure if I actually did gain their trust. I had this uncertainty about making this documentary about these people. They didn’t know me and they weren’t familiar with my work in the beginning, so there wasn’t any kind of image they had as to what kind of director I was, so that wasn’t really a problem at the time. I didn’t tell them. I didn’t hide it, but I presumed they had no interest since they weren’t cinephiles or documentary fans, and were just regular people, so I didn’t bother to give them an introduction to the kind of work I did. Kansai TV had made many documentaries on the subject of asbestos before, so they at first just treated it as one of them. The only thing was, with the Kansai TV documentaries, because it’s television, they need to be relatively up to date, made in the course of three or four months to screen shortly after so that the information stays fresh. But in my case, I was filming over the course of eight years, and just filming and filming and filming and never finishing, so it wasn’t until about two or three years into the shoot that one of the subjects asked me, “You’re the guy who did The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, aren’t you?” Nobody else really knew, but the word got out, and then [Sato Kenichi, a plaintiff] asked, “Could you show us—all of us—The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On?” That was probably about three to four years into it, that request. I showed it to them, but afterwards their attitude didn’t really change toward me—they just continued on. A member of the legal team, Tani [Chieko], just a few days before Sato was about to die, asked me to film him, to show that footage in court of his suffering in his final days, and I ended up giving that footage to NHK to use as well. I felt a greater need to make this documentary because of that, a real importance to getting across the suffering they were going through. It took a long time to develop a rapport with them, especially people like Sato.
When I was in my twenties and aiming to become a documentarian I came up with these two concepts of seikatsu-sha and hyogen-sha. The meaning of seikatsu is “life” and sha is “person,” so it has to do with lifestyle. Hyogen is “expression,” so hyogen-sha is someone who lives their life, and someone who expresses themselves or expresses something. My concept of seikatsu-sha was that of citizens and the general public, and people who live for their family and their family’s happiness, whereas hyogen-sha live for people in a wider sense, maybe poor people or victims of war, or people suffering in some way. They try to express their suffering and their difficulties to other people. I was more interested in making films about the lifestyles of people living really extreme or ferocious kinds of lives. I’d made four films in that sense, and I was searching for a new subject that would be equally intense, with a ferocious lifestyle, but I couldn’t find them. My whole thing was making films about strong people to make myself stronger as well, to hone myself and steel myself. So when the subject of asbestos came along, I remembered my origins and that way of thinking about seikatsu-sha and hyogen-sha. At first I thought I can’t make an interesting movie about just seikatsu-sha, about regular people, because everyone I’d made films about before had been very confrontational and lived in a very intense fashion. I felt that contradiction: I’d made films about this kind of people, and I’m now making films about regular people, who are still suffering, but they’re not particularly confrontational or anything like that. Nothing like Okuzaki Kenzo from The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On. It wouldn’t be possible to get scenes of that nature out of them, they didn’t exist. They themselves didn’t value conflict, they were not the kind of people that sought it out.
I spent eight years making it, not so much for the effort of trying to cover the entire movement, but just hoping that there would be someone or some event that would be similar to those previous films, that kind of conflict of an intense nature. But over that time the court case finished, and I couldn’t shoot anymore after it finished, because the movement ended. So I began editing. In the beginning, I thought two hours was the ideal time for a documentary. The first cut ended up being about two hours and sixteen or seventeen minutes. That version was screened for several days in Shibuya, mainly for fans and supporters—basically people who were happy to see my work, and viewing it in a positive light no matter what they really thought. So I was really uncertain. Is what I made really interesting? I wasn’t sure. Little by little people gave me their opinions of the film. Two or three regular people praised the film, but they were glad to see it, so obviously those sort of people would be nice to me as the sort of people who were looking to see me work, so I couldn’t trust that as a genuine appraisal of the film. One person said to me that it could be longer and it wouldn’t matter, that they’d like to see more. When I was editing the film, there were certain scenes that really struck me, but I left them out for editing purposes to get it to two hours. There were things that I wanted to put in, but I didn’t. That one person saying that it could be longer changed my way of thinking, and I decided to re-edit it, and spent another year re-editing the film. Of course I had to pay the editor again, the composer again; a lot of people weren’t very happy.
At first I added just fifteen minutes. I showed it to the editor Hata [Takeshi], and he said, “Why don’t you just put everything in that you want?” That really took a weight off my shoulders. I can just make it as long as I like, and then that version was about four and a half hours, and Hata said that was way too long. I watched it many times, trying to figure out what to cut, then eventually got it down to about three hours and thirty-eight minutes. Of course we’d shot about six to seven hundred hours of footage. I think there were five hundred plaintiffs in the court case, but the film itself focused on about twenty people. With two hours, I was worried people would be upset with me for leaving things out, so ultimately we got it down to three hours and thirty-five minutes.
Then, right at the end of shooting there was an interview with Mr. Yuoka, where he was very critical of the other plaintiffs in the sense that he thought that they should confront the legal team with their anger instead of just going along with what the legal team said and reading the statements that were prepared for them. He felt that they should totally unleash their anger and express that in full. When I shot that interview I felt that finally, this was exactly the kind of content that I wanted. This was exactly the kind of “person-scene-comment” that matched my own way of thinking. It summarized what I was seeking. I was slightly relieved at that time, but I was still uncertain that what I’d made was interesting at the time of the first preview of the three-hours-and thirty-eight-minute version for the subjects of the documentary in Osaka.
With the Minamata mercury poisoning controversy there was a whole dynamic within the people trying to get justice for the victims, with a split between the communists and the labor union, and that was often expressed in documentaries. In my film, the lawyers were kind of the equivalent of the labor union in the Minamata dispute, and Yuoka was more like the anti-labor union, agitated, intense side of the dynamic. I felt it was very important to express more of that conflict within the plaintiffs for the asbestos case as represented by Yuoka versus the legal team. I was concerned about the scenes that I had left out, but I was very surprised because they were okay with the version that I came up with, and they said to me, “Because it’s your film, we trust you. It’s our story, but it’s ultimately your work, so whatever you come up with, we’re happy with it.” I was very impressed by that: I saw them in a whole new light. Maybe I’ve underestimated these people, and they understand what I’ve done.
So after that, there was a screening in Tokyo for about fifty people, mostly again fans and supporters of my work, people who were really looking forward to seeing it. I was still concerned with whether or not people would find the documentary interesting. The people at the screening in Tokyo said yes, but they’re fans and supporters so I couldn’t really trust them, and there’s that uncertainty again. Then there was the first screening for the general public in Yamagata. Of course the people there said nice things about it, but I couldn’t completely trust that either, until, walking around the venues, I’d meet eyes with people, or people would introduce themselves and smile and say, “Oh, it was a really interesting film,” and I thought, “Oh, I can trust that.” Even foreign people there came up to me and said the same thing, and I thought, “Oh, maybe I can trust that.” Then I thought, “Hang on, this is a screening in Japan, so people understand Japanese values and thinking so maybe people can appreciate it, and as a Japanese film it’s linked into those qualities, so people who understand that could appreciate it. But what about screening it overseas for foreigners? What would they think about it?” But by the second screening in Yamagata I felt a lot more relieved because there were laughs in quite a few places, so that was the first time—to a degree—that I felt I had made something interesting. But then, of course, there’s Busan, and I still feel uncertainty as to whether or not the film’s message will actually get across to people and they can fully appreciate it as the people in Yamagata did. At present I’m still filled with that same uncertainty as to whether overseas audiences will actually find the film interesting in any way.
JNA: On the subject of certainty and uncertainty, the film presents a complex view of victimization and victimhood that you don’t often see in documentaries. For instance, you ask the widow of one of the victims of asbestos poisoning about her husband: “He was a good person, right? No drinking, no gambling?” And she answers, “Oh, actually, some gambling.” And you just drill in on those uncomfortable elements so that the victims become well-rounded characters. I wonder about that decision to drill in on the uncomfortable elements of victims’ lives, that for other filmmakers, is the first thing they would cut.
HK: The question comes down to what a film is, and my answer comes from my mentors and predecessors, whom I asked many of the same questions, to figure out what a film should be. My personal view is formed by the views of two people, one of them being Imamura Shohei, who said that films should depict people. And what he means by that is: people are cowardly, they’re lecherous, they’re cheap, they’re immoral—and that’s what makes them interesting. So when you depict people, those are the aspects that you should depict, because it makes them more human. The other person is the director that I made the film about, Urayama Kirio, and he said that film is for the people. It’s for the proletariat, for the weak, the downtrodden. It’s not for the powerful. Many films exist as de facto PR films for the powerful, and those are not the kind of films that you should make. You should make films that try to make the lives of the downtrodden and the weak better, and bring happiness to them. Those two concepts basically formed my thinking of what film should be.
Regarding Imamura’s view that films should depict people, I think that’s incredibly inadequate. It should be: films should depict people and their emotions. It’s not enough just to depict their qualities, you have to depict what what they love and what they hate, and that gives you a fuller view of their lives and what they’ve lived through and how they live. Also, more importantly, it gives you a view of the political system at that time. You can’t live separate from or be ignorant of the political system that you’re living in. Everyone is subjected to some form of suppression or control and experiences pain and sadness because of that. By digging into that sort of pain and hardness, that becomes a criticism of the negative points of that political system and what’s not working.
Going back to my point about hyogen-sha, or people who express something, they have to be people who expose their own private weaknesses as well—the sort of thing that most people don’t want to show to other people. That in itself also exposes the contradictions within a society. The people who I made my previous films about were people prepared to open up and exposure themselves in that way, but this time, the people in the court case really had to become hyogen-sha in a way, because they had to show the suffering and difficulties they were going through even if they didn’t want other people to know, or were ashamed to show it; they had to, to get justice for themselves. But because they’re really seikatsu-sha—those people who live for their families—they don’t want to do that. They’re happy for you to show the movement, but anything beyond that, anything they’re ashamed of or embarrassed about showing, they don’t want you to show. Many people refused my requests to interview them and show their lives. For instance, there’s a mother in the film, living with her daughter, and the mother’s sick. The daughter is married and has children, and is looking after her. And because the mother is sick, she takes it out on the daughter sometimes. She’s feeling pain and is feeling ill, and is cranky toward the daughter and criticizing her. So her suffering because of the asbestos partially destroys that family relationship and the happiness they share together. By digging into that, you can show how asbestos has affected people, and caused suffering in that way. You can show more tangibly how the pain it causes can destroy families. I wanted to show them as hyogen-sha, but they weren’t happy about showing that.
Of course there are praiseworthy things about the way that seikatsu-sha live their lives: they work very hard for the sake of their loved ones, and I’m not denying that or criticizing that. To get a more essential understanding of what they’re going through—their personal struggles and pain and sadness—they have to open up themselves, they have to expose themselves to a degree. That was an ongoing dilemma for me, trying to get them to do that, and trying to overcome that contradiction. In the sense of documentaries in general, if you just show good things about victims or people who are suffering, that’s a totally inadequate view of them as human beings. You don’t get a full understanding of those people and the life that they lived.
There were about sixty people in the plaintiff group, and most of them refused to be part of the documentary. In my past documentary, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, you have one protagonist, so you’ve got two hours to tell just his story, but with twenty-plus plaintiffs who agreed to be in the movie you have to show each of them in small scenes, and those small scenes have to show the essence of what they’re going through in their lives and their suffering. The way of doing that is to show the negative aspects of the conflict between them, lashing out at people, to get a fuller understanding of their suffering and the political context. Inevitably, if you ask questions carefully and dig into it, in the small scenes with all these people, you’re able to encapsulate their lives in a sense, in a concise way, by digging into those negative aspects, and it’s also more dramatic as well from a filmmaking perspective. Of course you also want to know, in their lives of sixty to seventy years, what the best aspects of their lives were, but you also want to know what the worst aspects of their lives were. So I don’t want to show people just as victims. I want to show them as people who have full lives of their own and emotions, for the reasons I said before, but also to elicit a response from the audience, whether that is sympathy for their struggle, or even a negative one of “No, I don’t agree with the way that person lives their life.” But at least you get a stronger connection by digging into those less savory aspects of the character, which actually show them more as human.
JNA: In your book Cinema Obtrusa, you address some of these same ideas, and you talk about how in these four films that you mentioned previously—the “action documentaries” starring Yokota Hiroshi [Goodbye CP], Takeda Miyuki [Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974], Okuzaki Kenzo [The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On], and Inoue Mitsuharu [A Dedicated Life]—you have very strong protagonists that you use as a way to pass from the public into the private, and by doing so, you are able to excavate internalized state power or self-colonization. You’ve talked about how you couldn’t find these kinds of protagonists any longer, and you’ve also talked about how you’d gotten over that stage in your filmmaking. My question is whether or not you see the methodology you took in this film, with a very long time period and many different characters, as a result of your personal development, or simply as necessary in view of the complications of environmental toxins which take place over a long period of time. Or is there a new kind of sociopolitical issue that you’re grappling with? I’m guessing it’s a combination of all three, but I’m wondering how you configure these elements.
HK: With those first four films with strong protagonists, I didn’t really have any uncertainty about the methodology of how I should make them. It was rather clear. But I knew that that previous methodology wouldn’t work with this film. I’m not confident that I’ve found a new style, but conceptually speaking, I feel I need to change, not by locking myself in a room and contemplating it, but by dealing with subjects, confronting them, and shooting them, and taking on new subject matter, struggling to find the best way of presenting that and digging into it. In some ways, the protagonists of my first four films, although they were hyogen-sha, expressing themselves in what they do, in some way they were originally seikatsu-sha as well. So finding those elements of both hyogen-sha and seikatsu-sha is probably going to be an ongoing path of discovery from now on. The only thing I can do is to keep struggling, and keep dealing with lots of different subjects, and try and adapt my style for each one.
In documentary, depicting victims of some kind is pretty much a constant, with the camera focusing on their suffering through some sickness or oppression. But recently I’ve come to wonder why that should be. Why always a victim? Instead, I’m more interested these days in the oppressors themselves, the people in power: what kind of faces are they making, what are they eating, what is their reason for doing what they’re doing? Ideally, I’d use the violence of the camera to strip them of artifice and the walls that they put up to find out why they seek power and why they actually possess power. To see them as seikatsu-sha in a way, as well.
JNA: The issue of environmental toxins is very universal, especially as we see them intersect with natural disasters in Puerto Pico, or 3.11 in Japan with radiation. A big point in the film is the way in which the government caps the liability period up to the seventies, even though asbestos was used in Japan up to 2006. I’m wondering what you think is next for the case, and as a general question, since you seem very pessimistic about the justice system as just a way to protect the state and not the citizens, if you see, like Okada Yoko’s son in the film, that we’re all being strangled slowly by small degrees.
HK: In the film, because of those limits, there were people, such as Okada and Iwanami, who were cut out of compensation, and after the screening yesterday there was interaction between victims from Japan and those from the Korean side, and the consensus seemed to be that there needs to be a movement around environmental toxins and environmental damage with asbestos in a campaign. That was the consensus, but not sure if that is going to work or not. More from a filmmaker’s perspective, what was really interesting is that I found out the asbestos processing machine from Sennan was exported to Korea, and they didn’t know who used it and where. Then there was word that it had gone on from Korea to somewhere in Asia, and I found out that it was very likely Indonesia. I wanted to ask the Korean side to find out more information and dig into the whereabouts of the machine now, and was told that it was very dangerous, and you could even put your life in danger doing that sort of thing. I found out yesterday that the machine from Sennan was brought to Korea by an ethnic Korean Japanese. Maybe a relative thought that they could make money that way, and the machine was brought to Korea. And then someone else thought, “Oh, we can make more money by taking it to Indonesia.” So people are still thinking they can make money from asbestos this way. It’s a fantastic story that needs to be told, and the fact that I couldn’t depict that in the film is rather frustrating, but of course that brings up the question: where do I get the money to continue reporting, and what happens to the other films I’m making? But I wish I would have been able to continue digging into this fascinating story.
Interview conducted by Joel Neville Anderson in Busan on October 19, 2017, and interpreted by Don Brown. Special thanks to Kobayashi Sachiko, Kuroiwa Hisami, and Shimano Chihiro.
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop will take place for the forth time during YIDFF 2017. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival.
Silent Thresholds
Philip Widmann and Nguyễn Phương-Đan’s A House in Ninh Hoa
by Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên
A House in Ninh Hoa
A House in Ninh Hoa (Philip Widmann and Nguyễn Phương-Đan, 2016) begins with ostensible sparseness: a translucent window, a narrow corridor, a plain staircase – ethereal hints of passages in space and time, tinged with unnamable melancholy. The camera continues to linger in pedestrian places: a chair encased in plastic sheets, a sunlit suburban rooftop, a view of red tiles and utility poles, a green grain expanse. In this opening series of static frames, time, neither compressed nor expanded, flows with nonchalance.
Mounted by the village road, a public radio presents unexciting news like the People’s Council’s goal for rural development or the police’s record of “2397 traffic violations.” The broadcast music, a gleeful tune recalling propagandist songs of 20th-century Vietnam, feels strangely out of place in an agrarian landscape that, despite its pastoral air, exudes more desolation and abandonment than collective labor and joyful productivity. Throughout the film, inescapable echoes of honking motorcycles and relentless construction signal an ever-encroaching wave of gentrification.
The sonic charm of the documentary, a non-fictional experiment with a dramaturgical framework, lies in the soundscapes of talking insects, crowing roosters and surging ocean waves, inserted between wandering dialogues like wordless refrains. These nonhuman sounds, easily overlooked as ‘rural ambience,’ musically fulfill a curative role as they spare viewers from the commotion of urban hustle and the tyranny of speech.
***
The scaffold of the story has to do with three sons from a family in Ninh Hoa, a small coastal town of Vietnam. During the Vietnam-American war, all three of them worked for the South Vietnamese regime. The first brother, a diplomatic official, migrated to Germany with his wife and children in the early 1970s. The second brother, a soldier, went missing in Cu Chi in 1975, right around the event known as the Liberation or Fall of Saigon, depending on who the speaker is. The third one, Tiếp, also drafted by the Southern Vietnamese Army, was sent to a re-education camp after the war formally ended. He is now the only male left in the family’s Ninh Hoa house.
This armature of information, divulged in fragments all through the film, is cleverly reiterated in the coda as a report handwritten and read aloud by Tiếp. This oral summary of his family history delineates dates, departures and deaths in a distinctly detailed and linear manner. The scene is the only instance in which Tiếp speaks for an extended period of time. Throughout the film, he either naps, peruses some old papers or wanders off on his own. The final report gives Tiếp, a ‘re-educated’ veteran who perhaps still lives with trauma, a chance to delicately acknowledge his frail health, or in other words, his failure to perform the hyper-masculine conception of familial and national duty expected of a Vietnamese patriarch.
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The most active people in the film are therefore not the supposed protagonists of the story, the sons who have gone missing, passed away or remained as feeble presence. It is the women who run the household with their soundless, meticulous and humble grace that embodies the way life unfolds here.
Consider the scene in which Tiếp’s mother, a benign nonagenarian matron, seated on a miniscule wooden stool, unhurriedly separates betel leaves over a sifter on the porch, a relic habit left over from pre-modern Vietnam. Later, resting by the dining table, she looks out the door at something off frame. Outside, clouds are passing, as the sunlit hue in the room shifts to a cool shade of blue. Neither the abrupt change in light nor the inexorable passage of time, as constantly recalled to mind by the multiple calendars on the wall, disturbs the old woman who continues to sit unfazed, suspended in some midafternoon observation.
Or consider the scene in the family’s second house, a new but uninhabited place, where one of the matron’s unmarried daughters drops in and kneels before a modest altar on the ground. As she lights a couple of incense sticks and starts praying to the house spirits, a faint whiff of white smoke ascends, filling the vacant room with quiet piety.
***
The intimacy of faith in A House in Ninh Hoa shows even in the most mundane gesture of devotion. In the family’s main house, the other unmarried daughter climbs onto a stool with bare feet to clean an altar overhead. In the same methodical manner, she goes through a row of ancestral photographs on the lower platform, dusting each picture frame with a small piece of cloth. The deceased all happen to be male, lost to either war or time. Cleaning altars must be a familiar routine, like the act of burning joss money for the dead, but the deliberate care in each polish generates a strange closeness between the female presence and the funerary portraits, and by extension, between the viewers and the daily worship act on the screen.
Besides regular caretaking rituals around the altar, excavating familial mementos is another occasion for the body of the living to connect with the imprint of the dead. People are often caught in solemn reveries, fingering faded photographs, unearthing fragile correspondence from messy cabinets, leafing through a wartime high school yearbook, dipping into the deluge of memories with aging hands. Each family member’s encounter with an old postcard or letter is tinted with mixed sadness and joy at the recognition of a beloved scribble. Viewers could almost feel the shiver in the sisters’ hands and their unarticulated regret. As our sight follows their fingers coming into contact with these charged artifacts, our bodies sensorially partake in the communion. Sheer close attention, on the part of the camera and the viewers, translates the filmic into the corporeal, even if translation is never a perfect transference. No longer a mediating barrier, the screen reveals itself as a potential medium through which the visual and the haptic might not wholly coalesce but sensuously blur and travel between the viewer and the viewed.
***
Material artifacts such as pictures, certificates or correspondence, as well as attentive documentation of these grave relics through the porous medium of cinema, are, however, not the only entrances into the invisible world of spirits. Furthering its discreet interest in the animated lives of specters, A House in Ninh Hoa plays with a repeated anecdote related to reincarnation. Twice in the film, one elder daughter tells the hunchbacked matron a deadpan tale about finding long-lost blood relatives through propitious dreams. Her two stories, or dual variations of a single fable, share a supernatural core: a bereft protagonist goes to a pagoda and recognizes a monk who looks identical to the dead beloved. These apocryphal stories intimate an indistinguishable desire for resolution via the pursuit of transmigrated lives.
In reality, the family does not stumble on such a fortuitous closure. Upon his return to Vietnam, the matron’s Germany-raised grandson starts a patient search for his missing uncle’s unknown trace. He visits a medium in Ha Noi who, after gathering the uncle’s biographical details, collecting his photographs and beseeching the spirits in hushed prayers, fails to make a connection. There is still hope, the medium suggests, if they perform the ceremony again somewhere closer to the uncle’s past dwelling in Ninh Hoa. For now, the absent remains missing. Still, much of the film, no less than the family’s persistent discomfort, revolves around this man’s disappearance and his grandson’s restless urge to locate an answer. The unending presence of absence has orchestrated a dramaless drama to unfold and enfold our attention.
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A House in Ninh Hoa defies stereotypes about documentaries tied to Vietnam and the war. The politics and aesthetics of the film are neither pedagogical ‘agitprop,’ embodied by militant films in the past such as Loin du Vietnam (edited by Chris Marker, 1967), nor an attempted participation in the now popular narrative of war victims overcoming illness and trauma, as seen in numerous Vietnamese and American documentaries on veterans and people living with war aftereffects. Perhaps because A House in Ninh Hoa was co-written by Nguyễn Phương-Đan, one of the family’s diasporic great-grandchildren, and Philip Widmann, a stranger invited into these national and familial entanglements, the hybrid result is infused with a strange mix of reverent intimacy and uninvolved distance.
The film bypasses clichéd materials such as historical footage of the war or journalistic interviews with survivors. Loss and exile are intimated via fleeting mentions of an unbearably long flight, a dizzying escape in the night, and the reality of a family truncated into separate parts across Vietnam and Germany. The emotional gravity of the film is initiated by postwar exits and reunions, but it spills beyond the war discourse. The filmmakers’ loosely staged framework enables the family’s improvised dialogues to transpire in a graspable form and simultaneously digress far from Vietnam’s perennially marked topic of war. Capaciously, the documentary observes and disseminates questions around the rhythm and unease of suburban life, the depth of intergenerational haunting, and possible throughways between the living and the dead.
Trinh T. Minh-ha once suggested filmmaking as an act of “speaking nearby” instead of seizing, explaining or “speaking about” the poetry of things. In a similar vein of softly keeping absence astir, the makers of A House in Ninh Hoa relinquish the impulse to capture or overdramatize a family’s private ghosts. Graceful moments of the film approach a silence nearby. Like the recurring hazy window in the empty house, the film is a semitransparent threshold through which tension and serenity, past hurt and present endurance, current searches and future cures, slip through. In the unresolved search of a wound-closing spell, comfort is found in sacred routines and mystical forces around what remains.
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop will take place for the forth time during YIDFF 2017. This project encourages thoughtful writing on and discussion of cinema, while offering aspiring film critics the chance to immerse themselves in the lively atmosphere of a film festival.
Living Rooms
On Another Year (dir. Shengze Zhu, China, 2016) and Communion (dir. Anna Zamecka, Poland, 2016)
by Becca Voelcker
Another YearCommunion
Framing
The boy nestles deeper inside the enamel bathtub. “Don’t use too much water!” A rap on the door and an argument brewing in the next room. The camera’s shallow depth of field holds him close. He is at home and on edge. We keep him company.
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Two films in the International Competition at the 2017 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, made by young women directors from China and Poland, share more than first meets the eye. Another Year (directed by Shengze Zhu) and Communion (directed by Anna Zamecka) frame relative degrees of improvisation within tight spatial and temporal parameters. This visual style emphasizes the idea of encounter—between subject, filmmaker and audience—through a simultaneous exhibition of spontaneity and formality. The filmmakers foreground their own ways of looking as an acknowledgement of their complex subjects, and how they regard them.
Both films portray low-income families: one shuttling between Wuhan and the countryside, and the other living an hour from Warsaw. Living rooms are where we spend most time with the families. These rooms are claustrophobic, shot by Zhu in static tableaux, and in Zamecka’s film, through a fixed lens at close range. The rooms are filled with television chatter and steam from cooking; they are grubby, cramped and lived in—it seems as if they themselves are living. Wallpaper has darkened into blotches in Warsaw, and children’s scribbles pockmark the walls in Wuhan. These domestic spaces are both walled from the outside world, and vulnerable to it.
Another Year chronicles thirteen meals shared between three children, their parents and grandmother over the course of a year. Zhu taught photography in her native Wuhan after returning from art school in the U.S. One of her students was Qin, the teenage girl at the center of Another Year. Visiting Qin and her family each month, Zhu would position her camera in a different corner of the living room and observe meals and conversations in real time. Over the course of the film’s three hours, we learn that Qin’s family work in the city but, like many migrants from the countryside, cannot register for welfare or healthcare there.
Each section is demarcated by fades to black, and the month written in Chinese and English. Nights grow darker and people keep their coats on. Between January and February, the grandmother has a stroke. Some months, we find ourselves in the rural house whose doors are open to neighbors and chickens. One time the dumplings are too salty, and another, stuffed too full. Qin has to leave school to earn money for her family. Fireworks crack beyond the steamed-up window as another year begins.
Communion, Zamecka’s first film, won the top prize at Yamagata. Like Another Year, it portrays a girl at home with her family. Zamecka took an interest in the family after meeting the father by chance at a train station. Perhaps thanks to her background in anthropology, she became close to the family and spent a year with them before filming. She related to the daughter, Ola, whose responsibilities exceeded her years. Communion’s script is based on what Zamecka saw that year: the mother was largely absent, the father was increasingly alcoholic, and Ola prepared her autistic brother, Nikodem, for his Holy Communion. As the film’s title suggests, caring for her father and brother single-handedly, Ola tried to hold her family together.
Communion’s script gives it a narrative tightness mirrored by fluent camerawork and cutting reminiscent of fiction film (Zamecka used a well-known Polish cinematographer and editor). Playing themselves, the family ignore the camera as actors would, and depart from the script as if they had none. Nikodem takes refuge from family arguments in the bathtub, where he talks to himself. When he mutters “reality becomes fiction,” a line Zamecka insists was not in the script, he expresses the film’s blurring of improvisation and staging. Zamecka closes Communion as she opens it, with Nikodem dressing himself and Ola helping him pack his school books. As in the way Zhu’s film ends as another year begins, Communion creates narrative closure alongside a sense of incompleteness: it’s another morning, and life goes on.
Family Portrait
Another Year is a chamber piece of two living rooms, a family that moves between them, and a discreet period of time. Given thirteen steady and lingering looks, the rooms and their occupants speak indirectly of China’s rapid industrialization, intergenerational cohabitation (and its tensions), and an inadequate social welfare system. They also speak of familiarity—ordinary familiarity and intimate familiarity. As if sitting in the corner of the room, we watch each meal and become part of the furniture; Zhu’s camera is barely remarked by the family. While we never see Zhu, her presence is palpable in her frames and cuts. This simultaneous inscription and effacement of her presence is appropriate given that she is both local and an outsider, geographically close and socio-economically removed. While the act of observing the family is one-directional, Zhu’s authorship is an acknowledgement of her particular way of looking. She reminds us that no act of seeing is unmediated.
Another Year’s third section of is a feat of symmetry and timing. We face a table at which Qin and her father sit. They look beyond us to a television. The wall behind them is mottled from backs and heads that have leant on it. Qin and her father share cartons of rice and fried eggplant that she has bought “downstairs.” We seem to be on an upper floor, perhaps surrounded by similar families sharing cramped quarters and steamed rice. On the wall above the father hangs a calendar, and above Qin, a clock. It’s March, and it’s twenty past eight in the evening. Between these temporal markers is another: a family photograph. The next section will be a close-up of this photograph, its glossy surface reflecting the television opposite. The photograph and the television, the clock and the calendar: four discreet markers of time, positioned in a quadrant. Qin offers her father more rice. You’ve bought too much, he tells her. The conversation turns to the youngest son’s cradle, which he has outgrown. Qin asks for new shoes. Alicia Keys sings on the television: I keep on fallin’ in and out of love with you… The conversation trails off as the song distracts them. I, I, I, I’m fallin’… The section fades to black and March falls into April.
A room is framed by walls, and Zhu’s static, perpendicular shots provide a frame within a frame. Each shot lasts over ten minutes and, without intercuts or zoom, there is time and space for looking. Zhu’s precise framing also draws our attention to what is beyond the frame, or missing. The camera that doesn’t move contrasts the family that has to move. Another Year opens with the sound of Qin’s youngest sibling in an adjacent room, crying for the father who is still out at work. A plaintive off-screen voice, an absent parent, trains outside, and phone-calls between Wuhan and the countryside: these are signals for the family’s displacement.
The cut is a defining feature of Another Year, sometimes occurring abruptly and, other times, feeling delayed. Each section of the film begins in medias res and feels incomplete because there are no definitive stage-exits. Conversation topics recur (income, the grandmother’s health, smelly chopsticks), and meals extend into leftovers. Such incompleteness is not only realistic to everyday life but also emphasizes the impossibility of rest or certainty for poor migrant workers. Life goes on, and their marginalization continues. We cannot know what happens after the camera stops rolling or beyond its frame of vision—such editorial decisions are Zhu’s alone. In turn, Zhu only films what the family chooses to show her. In these negotiations between improvisation and planning, subject and filmmaker, Another Year is similar to Communion.
Getting Dressed
Failing his first examination for Holy Communion was a disappointment for Nikodem; Zamecka decided to restage the communion as a rite of passage for him. It also provides a metaphor for the social (and in particular, Catholic) institutions that Ola and Nikodem navigate—largely unaided. No one in the community addresses Nikodem’s autism, and indeed, the word “autism” is not mentioned in the film. In this sense, Nikodem is a child braving unacknowledged obstacles, just as his sister shoulders adult responsibilities. “Communion” suggests community, but the film complicates ideas of inclusion and care.
Dress and the act of dressing oneself are important in Communion, which opens as Nikodem struggles to fasten his belt. He sits on his bed, panicking with the buckle. Faded damask wallpaper flattens his figure into the background. Later in the film, Ola fights tears and the zip of her dress, which is stuck. She is dressing for Nikodem’s communion, which her separated parents will both attend. Zamecka cuts from Ola to fuzzy home video footage of Ola’s mother, dressing for her own communion in the late 1980s. The child twists her skinny arms to fasten the back of her dress. Her own mother walks into the room to fetch something, but does not help. The scenes of Nikodem, Ola and their mother each show an act of dressing at home in preparation for going out. Watching feels intimate because the children seem so vulnerable in their imposed independence. Like the walls of their homes, their clothes are both fortifying and restrictive.
Another indication of Ola’s lack of support plays out in a conversation with a visiting welfare officer. The camera fixes on Ola as she deflects the officer’s questions and evades eye contact. The cutting is urgent to reflect her discomfort. Like Nikodem when he was filmed dressing against a wall, Ola seems trapped. There is little space for escape between the closed kitchen door, the officer and the camera. “My behavior could be better,” she says. The officer asks her father if he’s been drinking. The camera hovers on Ola, who draws lines in the condensation on the glass door. “Do you want me to report this?” There is no need for a reverse shot: Ola’s silent restlessness says everything.
Communal
Communion and Another Year portray marginalized, unstable and vulnerable individuals: in this sense, their subjects are socio-economic outsiders. Yet both films chronicle intimacy and cooperation. They access worlds in which familial references, idiolects, eating habits and memories are central. It is we who are outsiders, invited in. Nikodem is held safe by the bathtub while his world threatens to fall apart; the close framing places us in this haven with him. As cramped as Qin’s Wuhan apartment is, it is her home—and becomes familiar to us as we share meals there. A sense of responsibility grows as we spend time with each family: how are we looking at them? What feels strange? What becomes familiar? What is beautiful? What is unjust?
Zhu and Zamecka’s careful narrative and visual frames give subjects space to be seen and heard, they emphasize their directors’ perspectives, and they criticize films that use rough aesthetics as a shorthand for poverty. Shared meals and a communion are analogues for interactions between subject, filmmaker and audience. The auditorium at Yamagata becomes an extension of the living room: the films are emplaced encounters, expansions of a look. Zhu and Zamecka remind us that we are all enmeshed in systems that industrialize, individualize, and make some lives nearly invisible. Nearly invisible. Their films invite us into alternative systems of representation: ones which regard subjects with regard, and frame them for support.
＊First Encounter with Documentary: Screening organized by YIDFF Youth＊
“Yellowing” and “Up Down & Sideways” will be back in Yamagata!
Flyer designed by YIDFF YouthFlyer designed by YIDFF Youth
Date: February 12 [Mon, national holiday]
Venue: Yamagata Citizens’ Hall (Small)
Films shown: 10:00 Up Down & Sideways (83 min)
13:30 Yellowing (128 min)
Entrance fee: Free
This unique screening is being organized by YIDFF Youth, high-schoolers volunteer team set up for the YIDFF 2017. As many as 60 students came together to help run the festival, putting up posters in and around the venues, collecting tickets at the entrance and the like. Some of them joined workshops and even appeared on the stage as a MC at Q&A sessions with directors. Festival goers from around the globe seemed to be pleased to see these young figures actively participate in cultural activities and play certain roles in local community.
At Yamagata Museum of ArtWith Chico Pereira (of “Donkeyote”)At Yamagata Central Public Hall
The teenagers, who volunteered at YIDFF, Asia’s first international documentary film festival, are now planning to hold their own film festival. Venue, time and date, and most importantly films screened have been discussed and arranged all by themselves. They also designed the flyer and poster for PR.
Director Chan Tze-Woon (of “Yellowing”) kindly accepted their invitation to the event and is going to discuss the film and documentary genre in general with students in Yamagata. With his attendance it’ll be literally like a small YIDFF.
This young team is made up of students from various schools in Yamagata and its neighboring cities. They first met during or after the festival last year, but now they’re carrying out this original project with a good teamwork.
Selecting stills for the flyer
From the lineups of International Competition and New Asian Currents of the last edition of YIDFF, they selected two films to be presented as “must-watches for young people of their same ages”.
“Up Down & Sideways” directed by Anushka Meenakshi and Iswar Srikumar“Yellowing”, directed by Chan Tze-Woon
To our great joy, the Youth says that YIDFF offered them a opportunity to reflect what documentary is and what reality is. Hoping their own screening will open the door for younger generations to enter the world of documentary film as YIDFF did, they’ve named it:
＊First Encounter with Documentary＊
The students believe these two films will prove that documentary is NOT “something that makes you bored and sleepy”.
Flyers and posters to be distributed!
‘First Encounter with Documentary’ welcomes not only high-schoolers but citizens of all ages, especially those who have never watched or seldom watch documentary films.
Yamagata City has been recently designated to UNESCO Creative Cities Network. YIDFF Youth is very likely to make Yamagata even more vigorous as a City of Film.
Why not come and see the future generation realize this unique film festival of their own?
(This project is supported by Yamagata Prefecture.)
Films shown:
Yellowing
Director: Chan Tze-Woon
HONG KONG / 2016 / 128 min / English and Japanese subtitles / YIDFF 2017 New Asian Cuurents Ogawa Shinsuke Prize
Up Down & Sideways
Directors: Anushka Meenakshi, Iswar Srikumar
INDIA / 2017 / 83 min / English and Japanese subtitles / YIDFF 2017 New Asian Currents Awards of Excellence, Directors Guild of Japan Award
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