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Memories of Agano

Satō Makoto discovered documentary film when he visited Minamata (well known as the former site of an environmental disaster) as a student, and worked on Katori Naotaka’s The Innocent Sea. While touring Japan with the film, he met people who lived by the polluted Agano River in Niigata and decided to make a film about them. Living there with seven crew members for three years, Living on the River Agano was completed in 1992 and showed people who live with the river and work in agriculture and fishing, quietly probing the cruelty of nature destroyed. Ten years later, and after attending several funerals of people who appeared in the first feature, the team returned to the area. The resulting film Memories of Agano is a ghostly poem on people, fields, stories, songs and buildings receding into absence, the power of images and the strength of sound to revive the past.

Memories of Agano

5.2 2005
And Life Goes On

The Number 2 Lake Biwa School has cared for severely physically handicapped children for over 40 years. The renovation of the old and crumbling facilities provided the inspiration for making this film, which mixes 16mm synch sound sequences of the lives of the people in the home and their families with 8mm footage from the time when the school was founded and the earlier years of some of the inhabitants. Each of the residents has a different story to tell. One of the long-term residents decides to leave the facility and move to a more independent halfway house set up by the residents, causing his parents to worry. Another resident is wholly dependent on an artificial respirator and can only communicate by moving his eyes. As the seasons change, so the small dramas in the school unfold.

And Life Goes On

NR 2005
Mother, I've Pretty Much Forgotten Your Face

Pig heads, intestines, megaphones: all these and more have been thrown into crowds of loyal fans following the influential punk band THE STALIN or any of number of Michiro Endo's other bands since 1980. Taking a step in front of the camera, however, Endo offers a very different kind of encounter in this inspiring self-portrait. "Mother, I've Pretty Much Forgotten Your Face" follows the artist, a native of Nihonmatsu, Fukushima, on the 2011 nationwide solo tour celebrating his 60th birthday, which was interrupted by the Great East Japan Earthquake. Traveling, performing and talking with fellow musicians and activists, Endo reflects on the past and future of Fukushima, the legacy of Hiroshima, his upbringing and his feelings about his mother, communicated in the song from which the documentary is named.

Mother, I've Pretty Much Forgotten Your Face

NR 2016
Annyong Kimchi

Japan and Korea have had a troubled relationship over the centuries, and discrimination against Korean residents in Japan has been legendary. But how important is the issue of race to a younger generation born and raised in the country? Tetsuaki Matsue, a third-generation zainichi attempts to get to grips with the issue of his own national identity in this autobiographical video documentary made as the then 21-year-old director's graduation project from the Japan Academy of the Moving Image. (Midnight Eye)

Annyong Kimchi

9.0 1999
An Ant Strikes Back

More than 5,000 people died from the ramifications of overworking in Japan between 2006 and 2017 – and this is only the official number. Rarely do Japanese employees stand up against exploitative working conditions, since the social pressure is too high. In his documentary, Tokachi TSUCHIYA follows the case of a moving company sales agent who decides to no longer accept illegal employment contract clauses and a humiliating work environment. Initially being just like an ant among others, he joins a labor union and fights not only for his own rights, but for the rights of all “ants” in Japan’s workforce.

An Ant Strikes Back

NR 2019
Bursting Balsam Flower: My Chikuho, My Korea

Having spent her childhood in Dalian and Harbin in the former state of Manchukuo, Taeko Tomiyama carried within her the conviction: “As an Asian, as a woman, I will begin from the margins of beauty.” Noriaki Tsuchimoto, on the other hand, directed numerous films related to Minamata disease. He confronted the suffering of pollution victims head-on, continuing to convey the harshness of life with unflinching clarity. In an interview, Tsuchimoto once remarked: “Within Tomiyama’s narrative world lies something that could be called her eros, her utopia, her aesthetics of liberation. Why does she persist in creating such dark lithographs on the themes of Chikuho and Korea? And how is it that, while doing so, she can also simultaneously depict a world of such beauty?” This film not only reveals the allure of the lithographs themselves, but also centers on the dialogue between Tsuchimoto and Tomiyama. It is a portrait of two comrades, earnestly pursuing the meaning of artistic expression.

Bursting Balsam Flower: My Chikuho, My Korea

NR 1984
The Stolen Sea

Umitori takes place in Shimokita Peninsula on the northern edge of the mainland, which was becoming a “nuclear energy peninsula”, undergoing tremendous development and serving as the home port for Mutsu, a nuclear­-powered ship. Focusing on the fishermen and their stories, Tsuchimoto and his crew made their subject matter the “theft of the sea” perpetrated by giant business conglomerates. While the fishermen of Minamata were obvious victims of the mercury­-poisoning tragedy, the fishermen in Shimokita were inadvertently becoming the permanent victims of another announced trag­edy. Tsuchimoto interviews the fishermen, especially focusing on a stage play actor and his boat­-owner family, establishing, as it became his practice, a complex reflection about the threat brought to small communities by the forces of “progress”.

The Stolen Sea

NR 1984
Presumed Guilty - Creating False Confessions

Lawyers, an ex-police investigator and a former judge denounce Japan's criminal justice system as defendants in a high-profile 2003 election-rigging case in Kagoshima explain how detectives tried to extract false confessions on trumped-up charges of vote-buying. Those who buckled under the pressure and confessed spent over a year in prison. All the "suspects" were finally acquitted, but remain permanently scarred by the ordeal. This documentary is a dramatic reminder that indiscriminate arrests and convictions should be fought with the full force of the law.

Presumed Guilty - Creating False Confessions

NR 2008
Red Persimmons

The ostensible subject of this film is the growing, drying, peeling and packaging of persimmons in the tiny Japanese village of Kaminoyama. The inhabitants explain that it is the perfect combination of earth, wind and rain that makes their village’s persimmons superior to those grown anywhere else, including the village just a few miles away. The film’s larger subject, however, is the disappearance of Japan’s traditional culture, the end of a centuries-old way of life.

Red Persimmons

8.0 2001
China Heavyweight

In southwestern China, state athletic coaches scour the countryside to recruit poor, rural teenagers who demonstrate a natural ability to throw a good punch. Moved into boxing training centers, these boys and girls undergo a rigorous regimen that grooms them to be China’s next Olympic heroes but also prepares them for life outside the ring. As these young boxers develop, the allure of turning professional for personal gain and glory competes with the main philosophy behind their training – to represent their country. Interconnected with their story is that of their charismatic coach, Qi Moxiang, who – now in his late thirties and determined to win back lost honor – trains for a significant fight.

China Heavyweight

6.0 2012
Reviving Japan's Economy: Breaking Free of 3 Decades of Stagnation

Three "lost" decades of economic stagnation since the collapse of Japan's bubble era have fundamentally altered the country's global image, and spawned the term "Cheap Japan." What will it take to truly revive Japan's economy once again? In a rapidly changing world, the question of how the globe's third largest economy can avoid being left behind is perhaps more pertinent than ever. Drawing on both expert guidance and in-depth analysis of a wide range of available data, we hunt for clues that might point the way to Japan's ever-elusive economic renaissance.

Reviving Japan's Economy: Breaking Free of 3 Decades of Stagnation

NR 2023
You Decide

Just prior to entering her long professional career, Kaede Hatashima discards her masculine form and comes out to society as a transgender woman. In the brief respite between graduate school and her new job as an architect, she tests her wings as a woman for the first time. Through competing in a beauty contest and by giving lectures, Kaede gains attention as a gifted and talented transgender woman. While in the media spotlight, she seeks an active role in expanding the prospects for other trans people. Internally, however, Kaede cannot shake the self-image of a son rejected by his father, which remains with her from childhood. An ambitious trans woman aiming for social achievement and a son secretly wishing to be loved and recognized. Grappling with these two identities, what kind of woman will Kaede design?

You Decide

NR 2020