The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library Friday Theater （January 24 Fri）
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.
Locked Up Time 14:00-、19:00-（screens twice）
Locked Up Time
YIDFF ’91 International Competition The Mayor’s Prize
Dir: Sybille Schönemann / GERMANY / 1990 / 90 min
●notes
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sibylle Schönemann, the director of this film, and her husband were actually arrested and sentenced to one year in jail for allegedly ignoring the socialist state authority and law: they had applied for leaving the country. In 1985, both were deported to the West. Now, after Germany’s reunification, the director travels back with her camera in order to analyse and understand what happened. Will she receive answers to her questions? She traces judges, officials, lawyers, people who decided her destiny back then. There are countless heavily bolted doors and gates. Some open up, others remain shut as impenetrable walls. Dark corridors and locked up small cells leave an oppressive, claustrophobic feeling. The penetrating eye of the wardens persecutes us incessantly. It is a film about arbitrariness, reprisals and severe control by the state; it is also about impotence, blind obedience and lack of responsibility. Men seem to be just tiny links in a gigantic, unfathomable State machinery, where orders from above have to be carried out without questioning.
●Director’s Statement
And when I finally sat in one of my former prison cells and for the first time listened to my old feelings, met people who had tormented me in the past, but who claimed to have been nothing but a small executing wheel in the gear of injustice, referring to the fact that they all hadn’t known anything and had only done their duty, I decided on searching the roots and to find the men who had decided against me. I found mountains of information, few people who could remember or wanted to remember, nobody who said to me: “yes, now I know, that I did harm to you in those days（…） I realized that I was captured once again in this German plait of persons who did nothing but receive and accomplish orders, obey to a higher “necessity,” who had no idea of what was going on.
Sibylle Schönemann
Paper Heads 15:50-（screens once）
Paper Heads
YIDFF ’97 International Competition Runner-Up Prize
Dir: Dušan Hanák / SLOVAKIA / 1996 / 96 min
●notes
Paper Heads is a film about the history of Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1989. Compiling a huge body of documentary footage together with the testimonies of present day survivors, it reveals to us fresh facts about the country’s internal situation during that period. The director Dusan Hanák’s approach is a sensitive one: drawing on the personal remembrances of the individuals who lived through the era’s upheavals. These people, now already grown old, tell stories of that dark period in which they experienced imprisonment and were denied freedom of speech. Their lost time cannot be recovered, and for Hanák too it is the same. His film Pictures of the Old World, which was screened at Yamagata back in 1989 before the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, captured old people’s views on life and death with a unique sense of irony, but in retrospect, it now seems it was an indirect expression of the frank criticism of the system, as seen in Paper Heads, a documentary forced to be a masquerade. Thus, we glimpse a new side to Hanák the artist, and I find myself forced to reconsider my previous interpretations of Pictures of the Old World. In Paper Heads, a director who himself lived through the same trying time as the victims and witnesses inscribed in his film, shows us the deep wounds in his heart.
●Director’s Statement
This film is an emotional collage about violations of human rights and about the relation between the power of a totalitarian system and its citizens. After the Second World War, The Soviet empire was extended into the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It had promised “paradise on earth,” but in practice it wiped out all elements of democracy, introduced a government of terror and destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
My film is not just a review of the past: it depicts the desire of people to live in a fairer world. In 1989 the communist regime collapsed, and many nations are now once more looking for a way to democracy. This is a painful process full of contradictions. In my opinion, we have not yet managed to come to terms with our past, even though many signs of this past are still present in our everyday lives.
At both the beginning and end of the film, we see Slovak citizens gathered at an event celebrating May Day 1990. They are laughing at people standing on a red platform wearing “paper heads.” On another two levels, archives of propaganda are intercut with subjective testimonies of victims of the totalitarian system. In the end, we learn that the struggle for democracy is not yet won.
Dušan Hanák
Paper Heads
[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)
The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library Friday Theater （January 10 Fri）
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.
There is a mysterious group that measures physical distances between Rome and Geneva, Gaza and Jerusalem, and the measured figures are indicated. This work then shows the process by which those figures gradually gain political meaning. By making the “voice of god” narration cover the familiar images of Palestine, the complicated nationalism of the land is spotlighted. Layers of rich sound and text are intertwined, while images that carry continuity soon bring us toward the fables of Palestine.
●Director’s Statement
My work explores political issues through codes I create within the visual frame for reading the content. Ideas of illusion and disillusion, of truth and conspiracy, of facts and history, manifest themselves in my work through various forms. There is never one central point of focus. What I explore through these issues is creating a language and a space for the various ways in which material information can be read and finding ways of experiencing information rather than understanding it.
I have relied on the environments I live in and experiences I have to influence and drive the pieces I make. I look at the unwritten language of how a landscape or urban environment functions: what defines and constitutes a place, how individuals relate to one another within and in relation to it. I use language, sound, video, film, text, and photography as formal structures that delineate how the narrative will function and how it can be manipulated, and I experiment with representations of history and politics in relation to personal identity and the subjective experience.
I am interested in the space between public and private, between the political and personal, between fiction and fantasy. I am interested in words becoming images, images becoming material, and sound driving the various layers of a work to reveal itself. Most important in my practice is the drive to displace the work from any particular place, culture, or even medium. To take a specific political issue, a particularly loaded image, banal footage, or poetic piece of text and to turn all of this into material, undefined, and to create new information from how the disparate elements come together.
Basma Alsharif
We began by measuring distance
A World Not Ours
A World Not Ours
YIDFF 2013 International Competition The Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize
Dir: Mahdi Fleifel / PALESTINE, UAE, UK / 2012 / Blu-ray / 93 min
●notes
The director, a refugee from Palestine who immigrated to northern Europe, repeatedly returns to a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon where he once lived. He interweaves footage he records there with home videos left behind by his father, unearthing histories of his family and friends and the transformation of this refugee camp with frank storytelling. The tragic situation in which Palestine now finds itself is evoked from a perspective that is neither first person, nor completely third. The title of this film comes from a novel by Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian author who was assassinated in 1972.
●Director’s Statement
For me, making this film has been a conscious exercise in creating and maintaining memory. For Palestinians, and particularly those in exile, our identity and our collective memory as a people is constantly under attack, thus the mere act of documentation is part of a struggle to remain visible. Forgetting, for us, would simply mean ceasing to exist. Memories, even those trivial memories of everyday life, are the only proof we have of our existence. This duty to remember, to document, is one that I feel has been handed down to me from my grandfather and, particularly, my father. His obsession with filming nearly every moment in our lives was infectious and I have tried here to build on the record he left to create a portrait of existence as a Palestinian that portrays a more human story, not one solely framed by conflict and suffering.
Mahdi Fleifel
A World Not Ours
[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)
The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library Friday Theater （December 20 Fri）
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 ’99 International Competition, FIPRESCI Prize
Dir: Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hosseini / UK, IRAN / 1998 / 80 min
●notes
The building has two entrances. Men stride resolutely up the stairs through one, while the shadows of prostrated women, bodies swathed in chadol, flicker in the other. The commanding presence of such a family court, one which does not conceal but flaunts gender-based double standards, symbolizes the deeply-stratified structure of discrimination in Iran, and gives a glimpse into the sufferings of women forced into the abyss.
In Iran, where men are allowed to divorce freely but women denied this privilege, a “wife” must wager her entire life when she files for divorce. Deprived of rights, women wave the hem of the chadol, symbol of oppression, and call out, cry and sue as long as their voices hold out, clinging onto pale hopes as though thirsting for freedom.
With her new film, Longinotto, known for making films exclusively with women, teams up with anthropologist Mir-Hosseini to take on this difficult issue, and the results more than surpass all expectations.
The film’s coolly disengaged images not only lament the pain of the weak and the oppressed condition of victims of discrimination, but contain the deeply-rooted power to lift up the will and future of women. The faces behind the impersonal chadol are enriched as they call for rights, and a concealed but fierce individuality begins to shine.
By refusing to end discussion at problems with the family system alone, Divorce Iranian Style is a work rich in valuable suggestions for new ways to see the meaning of freedom.
●Director’s Statement
After Salman Rushdie went into hiding, there were quite a few documentaries and news reports made about Iran and shown on television in Britain. They were all hard current affairs stories and about things like the mothers of martyrs, the revolutionary guard, ayatollahs and fatwas. And then, about the same time, we started to see Iranian fiction films in Britain, films by directors like Kiarostami, and these were lyrical, gentle, personal films about ordinary people. It seemed as if the two kinds of films were coming from completely different countries. I became determined to make a feature length film showing individual Iranian women that a British audience would be able to relate to and feel close to. When I met Ziba and she told me about her research in the divorce courts, it seemed an ideal subject. It took us two and a half years to get permission to make the film.
Kim Longinotto
The idea of making Divorce Iranian Style was born in early 1996 when Kim Longinotto and I met. We were both frustrated by Western media stereotypes of the Muslim world, and Kim had for some time wanted to make a film in Iran. She had read my book, Marriage on Trial about divorce under Islamic law and proposed that we make a film on this theme. As an Iranian and an anthropologist, I welcomed the idea and we decided to work together.
The film is about the pain – and comedy – involved when marriage breaks down. It follows the stories of six ordinary women who are going through a difficult phase in their life. They use whatever they can – wit, charm, patience, reason, arguments, pleas for sympathy – to get what they want.
Ziba Mir-Hosseini
A Report about Mina 15:40-（single screening）
A Report about Mina
YIDFF 2015 New Asian Currents Special Mention
Dir: Kaveh Mazaheri / IRAN / 2014 / 54 min
●notes
Mina lives amidst trash in the corner of a park in Tehran. With the news on the radio in the background, she is oblivious to the hubbub of the New Year’s celebrations as she plays with a stray dog. At night, while standing around a fire, she trades banter with other homeless people who come looking for drugs and cigarettes. Mina dreams of a normal life—she too has a past, in which she lived with a husband and ended the life of their unborn child. For fourteen days the camera follows Mina, who has become a kind of godmother to the stray dogs and homeless people living in the park.
A Report about Mina
●Director’s Statement
When I was nine, my mother died. After I lost my mother, my father abandoned us, leaving my brother and me to fend for ourselves. My father too passed away eight years later, when I was seventeen. Two years after that, someone told me one day at a family gathering that he had once seen my father begging in the park. For all these years I have had a question in my mind: “why did my father end up in the streets and leave us behind, never coming back?” And I decided to make a film about a homeless person.
A Report about Mina is an attempt to root out the mystery of my father’s life. When I met Mina, I realized that she must be the one I had sought all these years. Mina is a woman living full of hope in a park in Tehran.
I decided to go to Mina during the New Year’s holiday, when most Iranian people are having fun alongside their families and friends. I had been visiting Mina’s place and talking to her and others there since six months earlier, and I had somehow become their friend. I turned on my camera and just tried to record my observations. I planned only to watch, without any interfering, hoping to find an answer about my obsession about my father. My obsession had a small change: now I also wonder why Mina lives in such conditions without even trying to get out.
Kaveh Mazaheri
A Report about Mina
[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)
The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library Friday Theater （December 13 Fri）
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.
Almost a Revolution 14:00-（single screening）
Almost a Revolution
YIDFF 2015 New Asian Currents Special Invitation Film
Dir: Kwok Tat Chun, Kong King Chu / HONG KONG / 2015 / 174 min
●notes
The Occupy Central movement called for civil disobedience in the middle of Hong Kong’s financial district, in pursuit of democratic elections. The movement attracted many sympathetic students and citizens, and became known around the world as the “Umbrella Revolution” in 2014. This film closely follows the action on the ground: debates within the movement, street speeches, the unofficial referendum which was held as part of the campaign, and the student-led protests at the Central Government Office. It examines the tumultuous thoughts and feelings of seven activists who were there at the heart of the struggle.
Almost a Revolution
●Director’s Statement
Some call it a revolution. Others think this is an exaggeration. The debate on the definition of “revolution” can drag on forever. Yet, it is no doubt a historic event of Hong Kong people fighting for democracy. As a documentary filmmaker, I felt overwhelmed with mixed emotions when I realized that history was unfolding before my camera. With limited resources, it would be difficult for our two-member team to record the events in great detail. However, I hope what the film has captured could contribute to the reflection and debate among those who support genuine democracy in Hong Kong.
Kwok Tat Chun
Almost a Revolution
The impact of the Umbrella Movement is gradually fading away from our daily lives. Yet, the dramatic scenes still linger in my mind, some sad and some joyful. If I had not been involved in this film project, I wonder if I would still perceive the Umbrella Movement in the same way. To me, making documentaries is a process of communication and discovery. By talking and listening to activists, I learned about the complexity and dynamics of the movement, which made me more understanding and accommodating of the conflicts and indecisions. Documentary also means memory for the future. I have reached an age where I need to remember our own history. This film, I hope, will be a reminder of the burst of optimism in seventy-nine days of occupation, and also of the long road ahead to genuine democracy in Hong Kong.
Kong King Chu
Almost a Revolution
Sunflower Occupation 18:30-（single screening）
Sunflower Occupation
YIDFF 2015 New Asian Currents Special Invitation Film
On March 18, 2014, a group of students entered Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan calling for the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement to be retracted. The subsequent occupation of the legislative chamber unfolded over twenty-four days. A huge number of video recordings captured the debates among the occupiers and their life sleeping on the floor of the chamber, the demonstrations carried out by NGOs, students and their supporters, and their resistance to state violence. These actions are overlaid with scenes from the 520 Peasant Movement of 1988 and the Wild Lily student movement of 1990. This film, the work of numerous independent filmmakers, captures the occupation from a full range of perspectives; from the voices of students who took part despite opposition from their families, to various accusations made by researchers and police.
Sunflower Occupation
●Director’s Statement
After the young generation stormed through the side door of the Legislative Yuan, it was as if the door to a bottomless black hole had been thrown open. The meaning of democracy was represented in the black hole. As a generation that enjoys a democratic system, when they realize democracy is being taken away from them, their solution is to claim it back. This film records the youth movement of the Sunflower Occupation and how these young activists re-examine the value of democracy and justice, a process that is full of sincere tears and laughter.
And so the documentary filmmakers picked up their cameras and begin to tell stories of the heroes in the “occupy” movement, to disclose their uneasy feelings when facing the crowd, and expose how small they felt in the face of democracy.
Sunflower Occupation Documentary Project Sunflower Occupation is produced by the Taipei Documentary Filmmakers’ Union. It is the first independent filmmakers union in Taiwan officially founded in 2006, by documentary filmmakers. The union is dedicated to protecting the basic labor rights of documentary filmmakers and to improving the working standards of independent filmmakers. Based on this mission statement, the union remains committed to promoting the development of the documentary industry. Sunflower Occupation is the first collective project supported by the union. Led by the executive producers Ho Chao-ti and Tsai Tsung-lung, directors including Fu Yu, Wang Pei-fen, Chen Yu-ching, Tsai Chung-lung, Tsai Ching-ju, Huang Chao-hui, Li Chia-hua, Kevin H. J Lee and Chou Shi-lun all made segments of the final film. More than a hundred people were involved in this joint effort. The funding was raised mostly online, winning contributions from 3,154 supporters. It is the biggest collective documentary project in Taiwan’s history.
Sunflower Occupation
[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)
New Asian Currents Ogawa Shinsuke Prize Erased,___Ascent of the Invisible
Text by director Ghassan Halwani, read during the award ceremony:
In 2011, as I started working on this film in Beirut, I received a surprising and very generous invitation to come and present my early work at Hiroshima Art and Document yearly exhibition, a rather small but sharp art initiative. While walking in Hiroshima, I noticed some arrows, clearly printed on the pavements pushing me to go to the epicenter, and indicating how many meters away I was from where the bomb exploded.
I decided not to go there, and kept repeating to myself all the reasons why I should’nt go.
Until one day, almost 2 weeks later, walking absent-minded, I found myself without noticing it, facing the Dome. It took me a while to understand what that was.
And there, I saw the shadow of a person engraved on a stone from the moment of the blast, and right then, I understood that this shadow was the only remain that can witness that there was a person standing here in 1945, but there was nothing left of him.
This encounter became a fundamental backbone within the conceptual structure of the film Erased, Ascent of the Invisible.
I felt very much honored when I learned that the film will be presented in Yamagata, and now I am deeply touched that there has been this profound resonance despite all the dissonance of time and space.
Memento Stella, directed by Makino Takashi. Japan/Hong Kong, 2018. Presented at YIDFF 2019 in International Competition.
by Elise Shick
Once I had a conversation in Manila over lunch at a restaurant that used to be a Spanish casino. I was talking about an idea I had about Lav Diaz’s cinema: if you look at the image long enough, you can see the movements of the particles that reveal the history behind the images. Watching Memento Stella at Yamagata Citizens’ Hall reminded me of this.
Just before the screening began, festival staff announced that Makino’s flight from Berlin to Tokyo had been cancelled due to Typhoon Hagibis, which had struck Japan two days earlier. Makino sent the audience a note expressing his regret over not being here with us and explaining how the film was made in order not to leave us perplexed by this combination of overwhelming moving images and intricate sound design. In the note, he wrote, “If you see an image gradually appear in front of your eyes, please note that it might be coming from your imagination.”
Memento Stella is not a narrative-driven film, or more precisely, the narratives are buried under ten layers of moving images orchestrated by eight layers of soundtrack, waiting to be disinterred by the audience through the cycle of seeing, hearing, imagining, and immersing oneself in the film. The details of the sound design are as complex as the images. At times we hear soothing landscape music, at times the disturbing sound of gunfire. 5.1 sound effects coming from the front and rear of the screening hall created an atmosphere that enveloped the viewers in this enclosed space, as if pushing us closer to the screen. The combination of images facilitated by the soundtrack offered us a visceral and immersive experience that abolished the notion of film as a medium meaning making. Henceforth, we, the viewers, became the subject matter of this film.
While staring at the moving particles on the screen and trying to identify them, I entered a dream-like scene. I saw the silhouette of a human walking towards me as if exiting the screen and entering my mind. Then, this silhouette multiplied and I saw distinct figures running from the left to the right side of the screen before turning into clouds in the sky. In a blink of the eye, these images faded into directionless, moving particles, and I realized instantly that what I saw was merely the mirror of my repetitive thoughts and impulses that are strongly connected to my own history and background.
Makino has built a space in which dream, reality, and imagination intertwine via this visceral experience of sight and sound. Behind each layer of images lie real-life phenomena captured by the director in different countries at different times. When they are laid on top of each other, movements in these images merge together and metamorphose into particles that look like countless stars in the sky. Perhaps this is why, in his own phrasing, the director named this film “Think about the stars” or “Don’t forget that we are on a star.”
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop will take place for the forth time during YIDFF 2019. 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.
Reel Talk
On Talking About Trees, directed by Suhaib Gasmelbari, France/Sudan/Germany/Chad/Qatar, 2019. Presented at YIDFF 2019 in Double Shadows 2: Where Cinema and Life Converge.
by Ryan Lim
Why is it that films about films seem more persuasive? Perhaps it’s because the claims they make confirm themselves by validating myths of cinema and automatically seducing the cinephile in us. Whether brilliantly or indifferently executed, a film that evokes the power of cinema benefits from our inclination to attribute that power to the film itself.
With this division between cinema and the film in mind, I hope to clarify some things about Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Talking About Trees. Its subject matter is a project of cinema that we can wholeheartedly sympathize with: four vanguard directors from Sudan (the Sudanese Film Group) toil to set up a “Revolution Cinema” in Khartoum. Amidst Sudan’s military dictatorship, this is a Sisyphean endeavour: cinema spaces are in neglect, the film heritage of Sudan’s Golden Age is nearly lost, while bureaucracy suffocates the group’s adaptive style of screenings. The group weathers these difficulties with defiant grit, canvassing popular opinion and staging iconic scenes from classical cinema in the middle of a blackout.
Though they also often yield to exhaustion and are overwhelmed by moments of absurdity, the group’s members refuse to be self-sacrificial martyrs of art. They resist not only Sudan’s severe reality, but a fatalistic response: they will not be satisfied with being a chapter of film history if it means nothing for social history. And once we grasp the inherent futurity of the group, Gasmelbari’s film-about-cinema begins to rupture: what emerges is a fixation on cinephilia contradicting the stance its subjects implicitly practice.
The inclusion of archival footage, the result of Gasmelbari’s impressive research, is a rhetorical strategy that seems straightforward on surface. In one such piece, a man is shot and the moment of death is replayed repeatedly. Yet, the gestures highlighted through such selections of footage are more indecipherable than evocative. Referring back to an image whose meaning is removed yet whose violent visuality is emphasized, the scene seems to serve no purpose other than for the sake of cinematic history. One may argue that these selections is merely the symptom of the woefully malnourished state of the archive, but even so the film embraces the image with such nostalgia that the effect becomes romantic, rather than a condition that ought to be mourned and recovered from.
This appeal to cinephilia is also replicated in the film’s reliance on a kind of shot where the camera bathes itself in the shadows of interiors and dolefully looks at the barren outside, as if furtively hiding from the light or accepting the status of a prisoner of conscience. This effect is incessantly repeated, conveying a sense of reality that feels more like a languid pathos: one thinks of the (probably) unintentional irony of the film’s title when the filmmakers repeat Bertolt Brecht’s assertion: “Talking about trees is a crime because it implies silence about so many horrors.” While the group’s operational tactics hurl them into exteriors, the film folds inward and into the very isolation they resist.
In an age when television and other fact-bending media (we see former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir appear on television to celebrate a rigged election result) only grip us further in authoritarianism’s iron fist, turning to the riddles and allusions of cinema seems like an ill-fitting tactic, if not a retreat into nostalgia. One especially sharp irony stands out during the film, when the Revolution Cinema decides to screen Django Unchained. If Tarantino’s film was successful because of its fearlessness in turning to brute force to topple totalitarianisms, one wonders what exactly Talking About Trees, and the way it contradicts the anticipation and futurity espoused in the group’s vision, hopes to offer to Sudan’s political struggle, especially as we know that the group’s endeavour will come to naught in the end. Gasmelbari’s observational depiction of the zeal that characterizes the group and their vision of cinema is certainly impressive, yet the film’s gestures towards cinephilia end up not complementing but diluting that zeal.
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop will take place for the forth time during YIDFF 2019. 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.
An Analogy for Times Lost
On Yukiko, directed by Noh Young-sun, France, 2018. Presented at YIDFF 2019 in International Competition.
by Kosuke Fujiki
From a boat, we see an island looming in the darkness of night. On its coast is a small green light, from which we are separated by undulating water. As the tide carries the boat away from the island, the light gradually parts from us. This very opening shot of Yukiko, the debut feature of South Korean-born filmmaker Noh Young-sun, sets the tone of the overall film. Evoking the haunting green light on a dock from The Great Gatsby (1925), the obscure light of the island captivates us, yet remains mercilessly unreachable. In the film, Noh explores the life and death of her grandmother, Yukiko, a Japanese woman who left Korea amid the turmoil of the Korean War; however, the filmmaker is always aware of the indelible distance between herself and the past, a distance which only grows wider as time passes by.
The motive for Noh’s personal quest derives from her relationship with her half-Korean mother, who was abandoned in infancy by Yukiko. With no childhood memories of her mother, Noh’s mother, now living alone on Ganghwa Island near the Civilian Control Line bordering North Korea, regards her own life as “a story whose beginning cannot be found.” For Noh, these missing opening pages of her mother’s life somehow make it difficult to understand her. Throughout the film, Noh’s mother is shown as an elusive figure, filmed mostly with her back turned toward the camera. In order to trace her late grandmother’s past and understand her mother’s loss, Noh visits a different island, Okinawa, where Yukiko spent her final years in a retirement home.
Similarities of the two islands are soon established. Just as the separation of Noh’s mother from her mother was one of the ramifications of war history, the fenced landscapes of both islands bear the scars of two different wars: the Korean War and the Battle of Okinawa. In Okinawa, we meet Yuko, a local woman whose grandmother, named Yukie, told her of the tragic experience of losing her infant child as they fled from the American military during the battle. When Yuko mourns the death of her aunt, whom she never met in her life, we see her sitting on the beach under cloudy daylight and burning incense. The close-up of her face staring into the sea is followed by a nighttime shot of the sea, thereby creating the effect of an eyeline match despite the distinct time passage. Beyond the waves, we can see a dim red light in the distance, not unlike the green light in the film’s opening shot. This parallel seems to indicate that, in much the same way as the filmmaker, the Okinawan woman is gazing at a past that can never be recovered.
What makes up for the blank pages of the past is a chain of loose resemblances, whether they be the militarized landscapes of Ganghwa and Okinawa, the Gatsby-like longing for a distant light, or an assemblage of similar Japanese female names which can be confusing for non-Japanese viewers. The stories of Yuko and the filmmaker herself are unrelated, and the histories of the Battle of Okinawa and the Korean War are, though not without connection, distinct from each other. Nevertheless, by demonstrating their similarities, Noh allows us to analogize the missing past. The past may be inaccessible and the records may be gone, but the feelings of the dead can be imagined through the experiences of the living.
Jurors：Ossama Mohammed (Chair), Hong Hyung-sook, Sabine Lancelin, Deborah Stratman, Suwa Nobuhiro
General Comment
We, the members of the jury after having watched these fifteen films were moved by the richness and variety of selection which gave us a vision of the world today that nourished us over the duration of the festival. Films which point the detained, the disappeared, the voiceless, the absent, the women, the exiled. These are subjects that are not easily filmed, and the filmmakers have risked in their approaches to representation. The films we have seen convince us that cinema still has agency, still can still change the world.
The Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize (The Grand Prize) Dead Souls Dir: Wang Bing FRANCE, SWITZERLAND / 2018 / 495 min
A rare odyssey into the “human nature.” A rare odyssey into the nature of cinema. Existence is the most powerful evidence. The cinema saves history.
The Mayor’s Prize The Crosses Dir: Teresa Arredondo, Carlos Vásquez Méndez CHILE / 2018 / 80 min
he film opens up the possibility of a new form of documentary. Its power comes from its ethic and dignity. The past comes back to haunt the present, which still resists justice. The incarnation of these ghosts in the simplicity of those wood crosses planted in the forest made us believe once again in a cinema that can change the world.
Award of Excellence Midnight Traveler Dir:Hassan Fazili
CUSA, QATAR, CANADA, UK / 2019 / 87 min
The most intense odyssey that we encountered in 2019. The director and his family recorded with smartphones even amidst danger that staked their lives, in the end producing a film. We express our utmost respect for this director, who has proven to us that it is at times possible to capture even the most acute moments of human life in cinema. This work, which masterfully depicts the boredom of waiting, as well as moments of dread, presents a unique, new form of road movie.
Award of Excellence Your Turn Dir: Eliza Capai BRAZIL / 2019 / 93 min
A cinema following the movement of freedom. The Brazilian student fight generates a flood of images and voices, a musical pulse of resistance and discovers a joy of articulation. An impertinent, lucid, collective proposal narrating our times.
Special Jury Prize Monrovia, Indiana Dir: Frederick Wiseman
USA / 2018 / 143 min
A wise man scanning the body and the soul of a community—Monrovia, Indiana. A unique cinematic language that presents with generosity and irony a series of stages where society is co-produced. A language that senses an underlying tragedy while giving us the space to arrive at naming it.
New Asian Currents Awards
Jurors：Yang Lina, Erikawa Ken
General Comment As jurors, we considered and talked over individually each of the twenty-one New Asian Currents films. The below is a result of wide-ranging discussions that extended close to seven hours. We paid no particular attention to things like the gender of the directors nor to the films’ countries of production, and our selection is meant to be essentially based on the works themselves. We ask it to be recognized that our process was informed by esteem for the directors and producers of all twenty-one films.
The films in this year’s program were diverse, including some akin to visual poems, some that questioned the relationship between documentary and fiction, others employing experimental methods, and still others that approached their subject matter head-on. We didn’t focus our attention on any one tendency.
As we remained acutely aware that we were selecting films for the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize and two Awards of Excellence, this might be why we ended up with films that take up large and profound social issues. We also considered films to be selected for Special Mention, but concluded that none were appropriate.
On October 9, just before the festival was to begin this year, Shiraishi Yoko passed away. She was a member of Ogawa Productions, and Ogawa’s wife. We would like to’take this opportunity to mourn her passing.
We come one step closer to the truth as the existence of those who have vanished becomes more visible through the hands of the director. Through simple images and his sole determination, the director, as if speaking on behalf of the dead, depicts experiences and problems that all humans share. Even more frightening than the dead are the silence and the cover-ups of the living.
Award of Excellence Xalko Dir:Sami Mermer, Hind Benchekroun
CANADA / 2018 / 100 min
The camera takes us, the audience, to the hometown of the director, allowing us to feel closely the people who watch over the village in the absence of others, as well as the universality of women’s fate. As they wait one year after another in the unknown, they carve out tenacious and refined growth in their very lives.
Award of Excellence Exodus Dir:Bahman Kiarostami
IRAN / 2019 / 80 min
This film opens a small window onto hardship, suffering, and other aspects of human existence. Their road home is tremendously distant, their circumstances and bewilderment bound by unreasonable bureaucracy.
Citizens’ Prizes
Dead Souls Dir: Wang Bing
FRANCE, SWITZERLAND / 2018 / 495 min
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop will take place for the forth time during YIDFF 2019. 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.
Chamber Architectures
On Hut (Gubuk), directed by So Yo-hen, Taiwan, 2018, Presented at YIDFF 2019 in New Asian Currents.
by Ryan Lim
If air takes the shape of its container, then Hut is a film best described as vaporous. It seems to originate from an innocent question: “How many people can one fit within a camera?” First devised in a workshop, the film is a document of a spatial experiment, and its matter is not so much introduced (as it would be in a more conventional film) as it is controlled. The space is a cozy hut somewhere in Taiwan. At the beginning of the film, three Indonesian workers enter. They are shortly joined by a growing stream of participants, who all describe themselves as “runaways” from their harsh working conditions.
Hut’s setup reminds one of a chamber piece. But there is certainly no drama here, only a blank canvas filled in by the participants. Stories of exploitation initially form the denominator of their conversation: in search of work and promised high pay, most are now in debt because of the exorbitant interest imposed by their middlemen. Irregular work hours are a further source of insecurity. Yet, Hut cannot be reduced to these anxieties. The roar of passing trains frequently resets the dials of their conversation, prompting them to find more imaginative forms of expression.
A transformation is taking place: they devise new ways to pass time, not with words but with action. Their reenactments take on concrete forms and leave tangible marks on the space. Some of their gestures are as simple as rearranging the furniture. Others are harder to grasp, like the smell of a homemade chicken dish one occupant prepares. The air is pregnant and expanding. What they assert is their occupancy of the unclaimed space of the hut: they are now residents, without the foreign skins they’re saddled with elsewhere.
In the middle of a skit, one participant declares: “This is the story of my friend. We come to act it out, because it’s all so interesting.” The participants resemble authors, claiming a power that would conventionally belong to the camera. At the same time, the bodily form of the camera becomes more apparent. Sweeping pans give way to sudden, paranoid cuts and swivel-arounds, as if the camera were a head reacting to its name being called. Topics shortcut from one to another, while asides splinter away from larger conversations, swelling the experimental space. These fissions threaten to tear apart the hut’s thin walls and overwhelm the logic of observation that structured the film initially.
Above all, the chamber remains, and since the participants remain irreducible to mere characters, the film’s true promise lies in its space and the tension of occupying it. Articulating the distresses that the participants bring to the workshop is not a matter of language or conversation. In the riotous space, speech becomes indiscernable, while fragmented utterances can no longer be associated with either speaker or context.
Instead, a sensation of sprawling, entropic and gaseous matter dominates the film, pointing back to the hut, the container giving shape to that matter. Hut affirms the importance of architecture in articulating its participants’ anxieties, finding a space to house them in before all else.
A note on the screening:
Life briefly imitated art on a Saturday afternoon when a full house gathered in the Forum to watch Hut. Outside, Typhoon Hagibis was unleashing a ceaselessly dull downpour over Yamagata and stopped train services, stranding everyone in this movie capital. I couldn’t help but feel a strange intimacy amid these stranger circumstances. Some of us could very well have come simply to escape the ceaseless rain outside, enjoying the intense romance of strangers taking refuge in a movie theater. Halfway through the post-screening dialogue, the air also exploded when everyone’s phones rang with yet another typhoon warning alert. And watching So’s intensely architectural film, perhaps we, after all, were the “runaway” participants, reorienting ourselves within our own temporary chamber.
The Yamagata Film Criticism Workshop will take place for the forth time during YIDFF 2019. 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.
The Spleen of Seoul
On Winter in Seoul (Seoul-ui gyeoul), directed by Sohn Koo-yong. South Korea, 2018. Presented at YIDFF 2019 in New Asian Currents.
by Kosuke Fujiki
For his adaptation of Korean author Kim Seung-ok’s early short story “Seoul-Winter-1964” (1965), Sohn Koo-yong has taken a wildly experimental approach. The narrative, the characters, and the time period are all disregarded. The language has been randomly shuffled so that the passages delivered in voice-over by an unidentified woman show no resemblance to the original, veering instead toward a word salad that goes like this: The muddy water dipped up from the ground by the night of 1964 put on a jacket and said, “Strangely there’s no one….” Against the backdrop of contemporary Seoul, however, Sohn’s film recreates the chilling mood of youth alienation in Kim’s short story, transposed here from the contexts of military dictatorship to those of current global capitalism.
Shot in black and white, the film soon establishes and periodically returns to the situation of a thirty-something man cooped up in a shabby motel room. He tries to write on his laptop, yet is seemingly suffering from writer’s block. The writer’s scenes are intercut with those of Seoul streets on a winter night. Trains leave. Neon signs glitter. Men and women in coats hurry by. The camera’s loitering through the city is reminiscent of the city symphony genre of the 1920s, a legacy of film history to which the film gives a nod in the form of a televised orchestral concert that the man blankly watches. Nevertheless, unlike the city symphony’s celebration of urban modernity, the tone of Winter in Seoul is melancholic. Instead of the glamour of the metropolis, the camera focuses on a stray cat wandering in an alley, a piece of scrap paper blown among passing cars, and bored street vendors awaiting customers. The film suggests that its prevailing sense of estrangement is a response to modernity: the uninspired writer is seen in his bed browsing a Korean translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (1869), a collection of prose poems depicting outcasts who lived in the margins of the world’s capital of the nineteenth century.
The floating of the camera, which suggests a disembodied flâneur, is contrasted with the protagonist’s physical confinement. In the street scenes, the camera constantly remains outdoors, with lonesome figures inside restaurants and street stalls being filmed through glass windows or the plastic sheet of the pojangmacha tent. The man, too, is a stranger to the city, as is suggested by the motel setting, yet he – unlike the mobile camera – is stuck inside the claustrophobic room. It is as if his soul had become detached from his body and transferred itself to the camera, wandering around the city in search of a home. Through this split, the film seems to depict the quintessential conditions of our modern world. It is a world which gives us an illusion of mobility despite our being trapped in our mundane life; a world where we can stay at any place but cannot belong; and a world in which, though it is inundated with verbal information, nothing makes sense.
One might wonder how Winter in Seoul could possibly constitute a documentary. Indeed, Sohn’s film stretches our perception of documentary, and some would probably prefer to categorize it as experimental cinema. However, presented in the context of Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, this creative endeavor can be seen as reaching its hand toward the contemporary reality of urban solitude and social division.
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