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Where Has All the Pollution Gone?

Where Has All The Pollution Gone? exposes air pollution caused by Japan’s largest Kawasaki Steel Corp. on a scale of ten times the size of Disneyland. Since the steelworks started running, almost every local resident has been suffering from severe asthma which resulted in a 17-year long court battle with the company. Filmmaker KORE-EDA Hirokazu traces one civil servant’s involvement in the growth of pollution administration that took place during the height of Japan’s economic surge in the 60s and discloses the connection between air pollution and state policy.

Where Has All the Pollution Gone?

NR 1991
The Minamata Mural

After a handful of groundbreaking films detailing the tragedy and suffering of the mercury-poisoned Japanese town of Minamata, documentary master Noriaki Tsuchimoto revisits the subject of Minamata through the eyes of the celebrated husband-and-wife painting duo Iri and Toshi Maruki. Tsuchimoto follows the Marukis from their quaint homestead studio, where they paint slews of ghastly, psychotropic mural panels depicting the effects of Minamata disease, to the streets of Minamata, where they meet and paint portraits of several victims of mercury poisoning.

The Minamata Mural

NR 1981
Palestine 1976–1983: What We Learned from the Palestinian Revolution

Starting with a scene of a refugee camp in Israeli-occupied Gaza in 1976, the film features shots of various districts, dispensing with narration and interspersing interviews with Palestinian people and fedayeen (guerrillas) in the rubble of Western Beirut. Children who lost their parents in bombings are educated to be soldiers at their orphanage. They say that they want to be soldiers or heroes. Boys and girls sing: "We don't want money. We don't want to play. We will carry guns and enter the Revolutionary Army." Two years after the filming began, the girls have grown but they have not changed their minds.

Palestine 1976–1983: What We Learned from the Palestinian Revolution

NR 1983
The Body, The Expression of a Creature’s True Nature

The work contains Butoh works and methods by Tomoe Shizune in omnibus format. It will be re-edited and published based on what was provided as the text for the Butoh course at the Grotowski Institute, Poland by Tomoe Shizune & Hakutobo, 2018. The Grotowski Institute is engaged in a wide range of research related to physical expression, as well as physical training based on the research of the prominent Polish director Jeray Grotowski (1933-1999) who founded the experimental theater "Teatr Laboratorium" in 1959. The coaction between Tomoe's music and Butoh is highlight.

The Body, The Expression of a Creature’s True Nature

NR 2020
With Each Passing Breath

Asakusa’s Mokubatei is the only theater in the Kanto region that regularly bills rokyoku—a form of narrative singing accompanied by shamisen. Backstage, a variety of lives intersect, and the art is passed down from practiced singers to the younger generation. The film’s main character is Minatoya Kosome. It follows Kosome from her growing enraptured by rokyoku singer Minatoya Koryu, then becoming the legend’s apprentice—until to the day she is formally announced as Koryu’s successor and namesake.

With Each Passing Breath

NR 2023
Radio Shimo-kajiro—The Songs That Led Us Here Today

Shimokajiro Housing Complex is a public reconstruction housing complex for people evacuated from Namie, Futaba, Okuma, and Tomioka, as a result of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In this housing complex, where people gather from different places and where many elderly dwell, they began making and distributing CDs on music they remember, also putting on a show as if they were running a radio program, and even forming a band to play along with the rhythm of each singer. This film is a record of these unusual support activities for the disaster-stricken areas, connected by music to transcend the times and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Radio Shimo-kajiro—The Songs That Led Us Here Today

NR 2023
Hanako

An unusual family portrait questioning the definitions of art, family, and what it means to be disabled. Imamura Hanako is a 22-year-old girl with severe autism. Once a week she attends a painting class, where she paints pictures in oils. Every evening after dinner, she creates what her mother Chisa has named “food art.” This may only involve arranging the leftovers from the day’s meal on the floor or a tray, but Chisa records the works every day, accumulating some thousands of photographs. The collection of photographs has now been exhibited around the country. Following Hanako’s daily life in the routine of the four members of the Imamura family, we watch as a portrait of a “very ordinary” family unfold.

Hanako

NR 2001
Nuclear Japan: The Nightmare Continues

Including interviews with refugees of the Fukushima nuclear accident, and scholars in nuclear engineering, environmentology and radiology, this film documents the injunctions against nuclear plants that attorney-filmmaker Hiroyuki Kawai and other anti-nuclear power lawyers won in the courts, as well as mandatory indictments against former executives at Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). This film is the ultimate nuclear power documentary, that only an attorney could make, exploring all angles on the issue of nuclear power in Japan.

Nuclear Japan: The Nightmare Continues

NR 2015
Bom

Malana, a remote village in the Himalayas, isolated from outside civilization for thousands of years has been fostering a primitive existence in harmony with nature and a unique model of democracy of consensus. They have also been producing some of the best quality hashish in the world. A real life story of transition, this ancient civilization being invaded and obliterated by the modern democracy. Narrated in an epic structure, a visual essay from the edge of the world with a message of trust, peace and eternal unity.

Bom

2.0 2011
Dust to Dust

The future of fashion is here and it’s being ushered in by Yuima Nakazato, currently the only active haute couture designer in Japan. Embracing innovative scientific technologies and meshing them with older material techniques, Yuima is determined to move clothing away from mass production and toward respect for the individual and our environment. While designing sculptural haute couture for the runway, Yuima dreams up his visionary and socially-aware practice through research and experience of environmental and production issues happening all across the world — this time in Kenya, where the scale of textile waste is a harbinger of the urgent need for conservation and social change.

Dust to Dust

NR 2024
Inheritance

In May 2015, a group of students from Tokyo, ranging in age from 16 to 23, head to a farmhouse in Sukagawa, Fukushima Prefecture. They were met by Kazuya Tarukawa, a farmer, and his mother, Mitsuyo. Kazuya's father took his own life immediately after the nuclear accident, saying that he may have encouraged his son, who had taken over the farming business, down the wrong path. Kazuya struggles as a farmer and the students who listen to him talk about the reality of crops in Fukushima four years after the disaster and the absurdity of TEPCO's compensation system, as well as his determination to carry on farming on his ancestral land.

Inheritance

NR 2016
Akiko: Portrait of a Dancer

“I have three tasks in my life: to dance, to teach dance, and to create dance,” says the pioneering Japanese performer Akiko Kanda in this intimate portrait of creativity and individuality, After seeing a Martha Graham performance in college, Kanda left her family behind in Japan and arrived in New York City, where she studied under the legendary Graham and became a principal dancer with the troupe. Following the wiry artist as she moves from practice floor to performance hall, and from the cramped single-room apartment she lives in to a trip home to see her aging mother, director Sumiko Haneda reveals a woman who has rebelled against traditional ideals of marriage and motherhood, and who nearly single-handedly brought modern dance to Japan-and kept it alive. “When I die,” Kanda tells the director, “I will be content if I can just say, ‘I danced.'”

Akiko: Portrait of a Dancer

NR 1985
The Other Hiroshima: Korean A-bomb Victims Tell Their Story

Living in a slum damaged by the atomic bomb and watching elderly first-generation zainichi hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) pass away one after another, Pak felt compelled to break their silence with this documentary, her first. Using up all her savings and going into debt, she teamed up with cinematographer Otsu Koshiro and collected these testimonials from zainichi North and South Koreans living in Hiroshima and South Korean hibakusha visiting Japan for medical treatment.

The Other Hiroshima: Korean A-bomb Victims Tell Their Story

NR 2005
Under the Cherry Tree

Feature documentary debut of 29 year old director Kei Tanaka. In the Japanese town of Kawasaki, elderly residents who have lived hard lives are now facing their own death at a public housing complex called “Danchi“. The young director explores and depicts the ageing population in Japan by focusing on the personal lives of few individuals who live quietly on the outskirts of society. While some of the protagonists chose to interact and establish friendships with their fellow elderly residents, others prefer to spend the rest of their years in solitary.

Under the Cherry Tree

6.0 2016
My Life

This work was started in 1967 as a documentation of Nakajima’s life. The footage was edited into a single piece for the first time in 1974, in time to show the work to the curator Barbara London, who was visiting Japan. Generations of his family were lost and gained that year, with Nakajima's mother passing away, and then his child was born. The piece is an installation with two monitors; the left presents his mother and himself, and the right, his child and himself. Nakajima continues to work on the sequels of "My Life" with his grandchild.

My Life

NR 1976
Iyomande: The Ainu Bear Festival

Documents the most important ceremony of the Ainu people of northern Japan. For both the Ainu – and the peoples of the Amur river area on the mainland – the bear is an important spirit ancestor, and the annual ceremonial year used to revolve around ceremonies of the bear cult, where a bear is ritually killed and its spirit honoured. Also documented are aspects of Ainu daily life in the 1930s: houses, boats, ornate swords, religious artifacts, and the elaborately tattooed mouths of the older women. There are two shortened versions (28 and later 25 minutes) of this documentary edited in the 1960s. Although shorter, these versions include some new images that Munro had not sent to England.

Iyomande: The Ainu Bear Festival

NR 1931
Dying Out of Sight: Hikikomori in an Aging Japan

It's estimated over a million Japanese live as "hikikomori," recluses totally withdrawn from society. Some hikikomori may even go for decades without leaving their house. While in the past the phenomenon was most commonly associated with young men, recent data has revealed a much wider demographic of people whose confidence in themselves, and in society, has been shattered. As the parents or relatives hikikomori so often depend on entirely become too old to care for them, many now face a dire situation, left alone and unable to cope.

Dying Out of Sight: Hikikomori in an Aging Japan

8.0 2021
This Magic Moment

Lim Kah Wai, director of Your Lovely Smile, embarks on a similar journey as the protagonist in his film, visiting dozens of mini theatres from Okinawa to Hokkaido. Lim is not pitching his new film, but meeting the staff and owners of the theatres to make a documentary about how they struggle in the shrinking market. In empty cinema houses, the people speak of the common and personal challenges they encounter. Although they might have made different decisions – whether to hang on or move on, they share a pure love for and a genuine belief in cinema that they wish to pass on to the next generation.

This Magic Moment

NR 2023
Kids Konference

Hilarious but profound documentary, filmed at a nursery school where children enjoy "conferences" throughout a year. "Why were you born?" "How can we avoid fighting?" "Who made the universe?" "The booger tastes like kinako." The strange ideas and straightforward words that the children unfold make us laugh and sometimes surprise. Their discussion may give us full of hints for thinking about "how we live in the world without answers." Now, the world's weirdest and most important "Kids konference" by little wise men is about to begin.

Kids Konference

NR 2022