Dir: Frederick Wiseman / USA / 2018 / 143 min
YIDFF 2019 International Competition Special Jury Prize
[Synopsis]
After the 2016 Presidential election, Frederick Wiseman chose the farming town of Monrovia, Indiana as his next subject. Turning his careful gaze on the pastoral site of farms, in addition to a freemason’s lodge, a lions club, a high school, a church, and a gun shop, Wiseman paints a picture of the people who are seen as maintaining an old-fashioned lifestyle and holding so-called “traditional American values.” His graceful sketching of their daily life, meetings, and special events reveals the full scope of this town’s social structure. Here is the true face of the ordinary people who are sometimes presented as underpinning American society.
[Director’s Statement]
I thought a film about a small farming community in the Midwest would be a good addition to the series I have been doing on contemporary American life. Monrovia, Indiana appealed to me because of its size (1,063 residents), location (I have never shot a film in the rural Midwest) and the shared cultural and religious interests within the community. During the nine weeks of filming the residents of Monrovia were helpful, friendly and welcoming and gave me access to all aspects of daily life. Life in big American cities on the east and west coasts is regularly reported on, and I was interested in learning more about life in small town America and sharing my view.
[Venue] The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library (Yamagata Big Wing 3F)
[Admission] Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free)
[Presented by] YIDFF (NPO)
[Contact] phone: 023-666-4480 (YIDFF Yamagata office)
【Synopsis】
In Los Angeles, the raison d’etre of a Filipino local captured through a mix of American culture and Tagalog language. Degraded video, a youth engulfed in noise, the ringing of Tagalog’s footfalls, a grandmother’s figure on video tape, the repeating rhythm of chaos—with these images, we peer into the director’s mind, etched into Super 8 film.
【Synopsis】
Home videos taken in the 1990s—when the director and his family emigrated from the Philippines to Los Angeles—ooze with unease and longing for home. And now. This video letter from the director’s father to his family in the Philippines exposes an existence in America that has “dis-integrated.” The images are overlaid with the voice of the director who was raised here, speaking American English like a ghost, coming together to make a film that forges forward at full speed at the viewer.
【Synopsis】
“Mama has two phone numbers.” An overlapping multiplicity of American voices, threaded through with the director’s own family story, centering on his mother. A journey of film in the space it takes a train to leave California where his family lives, and head to New York where he goes to college. Although he is haunted by the fear of being asked for ID or his immigration status found out by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), this film reveals through his eyes, in scenes of the passengers and stations along the way, fragments of the US that “is not.”
[Venue] The YAMAGATA Documentary Film Library (Yamagata Big Wing 3F)
[Admission] Free admission for members (Member’s fee: free)
[Presented by] YIDFF (NPO)
[Contact] phone: 023-666-4480 (YIDFF Yamagata office)
Dir: Erich Langjahr / SWITZERLAND / 1996 / 35mm / 100 min
YIDFF ’97 International Competition
◆Erich Langjhar portrays the everyday life of a farmer in our time, a life which is endangered by the strains of a modern society defined by consumerism, the market economy, profit-maximization, share holder values, exploitation of natural resources and destruction of the environment.
The filmmaker observes, with a highly visual sense and sensibility, the trivial details of everyday farming life: feeding pigs, making cheese, milking cows, scattering dung, carving wood during the winter.
Langjhar does not however intend to explain farming techniques and their clich市, or to analyze the acute problems of today’s farmer. Nor does he romanticize alpine life. Rather, he is concerned with the value of ” being ” of existing in a world where humans still retain their identities and dignity, where people are still a part of their respected and cared-for natural surroundings.
There are almost no words, no dialogue in the film. The camera moves slowly. Landscapes unfold in breathtaking colors. His (the camera’s) eye lingers over insignificant details, conjuring up poetic and sensual images. Words and explanations are superfluous. The slow tempo and serenity of the film provide mental space which allows the viewer’s imagination to drift freely, meditating and reflecting on their personal situation. （Regula König）
Dir: Teo Qi Yu / SINGAPORE / 2019 / Blu-ray / 29 min
YIDFF 2019 New Asian Currents
(with English and Japanese subtitles)
【Synopsis】
This film tells the story of the director’s grandfather, who immigrated to Singapore from China when he was a child. Although he eventually had a family and ran an electronics store in Singapore, he never forgot his home of Xi’an and the family he left there. Now, after being diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live, he faces the end of his life while still maintaining his daily rhythms, opening his store every morning. His granddaughter’s camera captures the love her taciturn grandfather holds for Xi’an by unbolting the doors of his memory leading to the “other home,” that had been slumbering until now, deep within the home he now inhabits.
Dir: So Yo-hen / TAIWAN / 2018 / Blu-ray / 54 min
YIDFF 2019 New Asian Currents
(with English and Japanese subtitles)
【Synopsis】
A crude hut made from scrap materials, somewhere in Taiwan. Indonesian workers talk to each other, sitting in a circle and introducing themselves, telling of the harsh work conditions they suffer and why they ended up in this small hut. Before one story is finished, another worker arrives, and then another. Eventually the hut is filled with people, and with the sound of passing airplanes in the background, conversations swirl together with clapping, toasts, and weeping, until it all reaches a boiling point. Born from a workshop for laborers from abroad, who tell their many unique stories.
Dir: Ekta Mittal / INDIA / 2018 / Blu-ray / 80 min
YIDFF 2019 International Competition
【Synopsis】
From an agricultural village in the suburbs of India, untold numbers of men set off for urban areas to work as migrants, never to be heard from again. The wives and mothers they leave behind never cease yearning to uncover some trace of those gone missing. Inspired by modern Panjabi-Sufi Poetry and the concept of Birha (the “sadness of separation,” also the film’s original language title), it is a cinematic work about loved ones who are not with us, in which various images of absence are layered and depicted. If those living on the bottom are never able to escape poverty, then the anguish of these women, like a thick fog, will never clear. A phantasmagorical mood pervades this film, out of which emerges India’s cruel reality.
【Director’s Statement】
Absence (“birha”) is a continuation of “Behind the Tin Sheets,” a collaborative film project conceived in 2009, that focuses on the sub-conscious of the migrant worker in the city. With time, my friendships with the workers led me to their families, in faraway villages in India. The film starts where the previous film ended: with rain and a deep sense of longing for home. It is a personal film that speculates on incomplete conversations between my family and my uncle who went missing.
All the people in the film are related in the workers I met in Bangalore while the Metro rail was built. Points of departure from the village or the city, is a progressive shift towards detachment. After one has smelt the life in a city, a different identity is born filled with fantasies and longing. The struggle of everyday life becomes mundane and repetitive. People back home, wait, react to change and difference, but over time, teach themselves to forget and resist quietly. It is in this silence, perhaps that one ponders about impermanence. I learnt that yearning as an everyday practice, similar to that in birha poetry written by Sufi poets. There is no word for birha, in English; it can only be sensed at a metaphysical, metaphoric level.
In contrast to the rhythm of life often set by digital technologies and hyper visual environments, the film invites the audience to look inwards, and locate oneself against the backdrop of human pathos. The film is rooted in birha poetry and the inner worlds of workers, in relation to the larger material world we inhabit with all its contradictions. It hopes to awaken a sensuous experience premised on unsettling and unknown terrains that we are usually afraid to tread on—that of our nightmares, suppressed feelings and persistent faith. One has to live with its recurring interference. The haunting feeling returns.
YIDFF 2019 Encore Screenings Part 4: Living in the Village
August 21 (Fri) 14:00, 19:00 (screens twice)
Xalko
Directors, Producers: Sami Mermer, Hind Benchekroun / CANADA / 2018 / Kurdish / Color / 100 min
【Synopsis】
The men of the director’s hometown, a Kurdish village called Xalko, are off making a living in Europe. All the while, the women they leave behind to care for their households in their absence remain worried about them, though the men don’t always send enough money or manage to stay in contact. The women work, airing their grievances about the hard lives they lead in the village, their conversation always circling back to their absent fathers and husbands. The director’s uncle comes for a brief visit after seven years away, to be with his wife and now grown daughters. A formal wedding, the everyday life of women chatting about this and that…beneath it all brims the joy and anger, grief and laughter of one large “family.”
【Director’s Statement】
I was born in Xalko and lived there until I turned seventeen. My brother, my sisters, my mother and I waited endlessly for the return of my father, gone to Europe to work. He came back from time to time in the summer, the “season” of marriages. He stayed a few weeks with us and then he left again. Still, in spite of his absence, we knew how to find some kind of happiness for ourselves on a daily basis. Charismatic and strong, my mother held the rest of the family together and our lives continued with the unraveling of seasons: school, holidays, games with the village’s children, domestic tasks, but also the guard of the animals, the tornados of wind and sand, and the winter with its snow, etc.
Then the news came. My father had died of a heart attack while attempting to cross clandestinely the Swiss-Austrian border with other Kurdish refugees. Never again did he return to Xalko. One year later, it was my turn to leave my home and the village to go study.
I only returned to Xalko after a long absence of 10 years in North America. Half of the three thousand houses were empty. Mainly women and children remained. I was touched to see that these guardians of the fort stayed strong, doing all they could to maintain the village’s vitality and to preserve it against winds and tides.
This return to my native village awoke my memories. They are the catalyst for this film. I felt an urgent need to bear witness on the life of this village before it is completely deserted and to pay tribute to those who maintain it alive.
YIDFF 2019 Encore Screenings Part 3: Living the Light
July 17 (Fri) 14:00, 19:00 (screens twice) Living the Light—Robby Müller
Dir: Claire Pijman / THE NETHERLANDS / 2018 / 86 min
YIDFF 2019 International Competition
Follows the life and work of legendary cameraman Robby Müller, using the considerable amount of personal footage he left behind. The documentary reveals how Müller’s life and films were inseparable from the everyday images he captured with the gaze of his camera.
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.
Dust collecting in projectors and rooms, tiny grains swirling around a mine, fine particles of pigment produced in a factory, dirt accumulating around trees and shrubs to be washed away by the rain; fierce storms of debris from exploding missiles and from the disintegration of the World Trade Center on 9/11; and cosmic star dust . . . This film observes the varieties of dust suffusing the world, interspersing the thoughts of scientists and technical experts.
Staub (Dust)
●Director’s Statement
A speck of dust is just about perceptible to the naked eye. It’s the smallest visible subject a film can be about—it’s a medium of disappearance and a criterion of perception. Wherever we go, it has already beaten us there; wherever we turn, it follows us. It is our past, our present, and our future. It is universal and has a name in every language. It keeps housewives busy, as well as scientists, inventors, artists, and entire industrial branches. It is blamed for feeding vermin and causing illness. It takes ownership of our possessions, it penetrates laboratories, it creates planets and galaxies. We’re surrounded by it, it gets inside us, we shed it . . . It nestles right into the despair of its own existence.
Hartmut Bitomsky
Staub (Dust)
Picture of Light 16:00-（screens once）
Picture of Light
YIDFF ’95 International Competition Runner-up Prize
Dir: Peter Mettler / CANADA, SWITZERLAND / 1994 / 35mm / 83 min
●notes
Picture of Light is an hallucinatory documentary tale which documents a filmmaker’s journey to Canada’s arctic in search of the Northern Lights. While combining glimpses of the characters who live in this remote environment and the crew’s both comic and absurd attempts to deal with extremes, the film reflects upon the paradoxes involved in trying to capture the natural wonder of the Northern Lights on celluloid.
Picture of Light
●Director’s Statement
The Old Inuit said that most of all he liked to hunt. Perhaps we are modern day hunters. Having no need to capture our nourishment, we seek out other things. Once again I struggle with the impulse to get my camera… but to simply watch instead…
Soon we’ll be standing in a virtual world—one that wo have created with wires instead…
We’ve come to the arctic to capture a picture of light—lured by the miracle of Nature. Living in a time where things do not seem to exist if they are not captured as an image.
But if you close your eyes you may see the lights of your own retina. Not unlike the Northern Lights—not unlike the movements of thought. Like a shapeless accumulation of everything we will ever see.
A film that takes the audience to a distant land—to look and see, offering food for ideas, interpretation, and experience. A reflection on the state of things, using technology to capture one of Nature’s greatest wonders.
Peter Mettler
Picture of Light
[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)
Higuchi Genichiro—The Mysteries of Life, the Micro Universe
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.
14:00- 19:00- (screens twice)
Secret in the Hive（“Joobachi no Shinpi”）
1962／16mm／33 min The Life Cycle of Cellular Slime Mold（“Saibosei nenkin no seikatsushi”）
1982／16mm／15 min Behavior and Differentiation of Cellular Slime Mold（“Saibosei nenkin no Kodo to bunka”）
1991／16mm／21 min The Life History of Slime Molds（“Shinsei nenkin no seikatsushi”）
1997／16mm／28 min
Secret in the Hive
Secret in the Hive
Observe bee society, where thousands of bees maintain a perfectly balanced order with the queen at its center. Showing events such as the dance to transmit information, the system of work division, and warfare with hornets, the camera records in detail a whole society that operates as if it were a single organism.
Secret in the Hive
The Life History of Slime Molds
True slime molds originated on earth one billion years ago, and have adapted skillfully to their environment. Micrography captures the plasmodia’s rhythmical protoplasmic flow, movement of the slime mold invisible to the naked eye, and more. Higuchi observed this intriguing world of tiny organisms for a long time, completing this tour de force at age ninety-one.
16:00- (single screening)
Experiments on Microorganisms（“Biseibutsu no jikken”）
1970／16mm／20 min Shiitake（“Kinoko—Shiitake kin wo saguru”）
1980／16mm／28 min MIdorinaru daichi wo tsukuru—Kin to shokubutsu no kyosei wo ikashite
1995／16mm／24 min Symbiosis between Fungi and Plants（“Kin to shokubutsu no kyosei”）
1999／16mm／28 min
Higuchi Genichiro
Born March 14, 1906, in Tendo City, Yamagata Prefecture. While working as a banker, he graduated from an evening course at Meiji University. Aspiring to become a painter, he studied Renaissance art with Kimura Shohachi. After reading an essay on film by Terada Torahiko, he became interested in issues of art and science, and entered the film industry when he was in his thirties. In 1942, he made his directorial debut with Youth Corps, Defenders of the Skies. For the next sixty years, until his final film The World of Mushrooms (2001), completed in his late nineties, he was continuously active as a filmmaker. He is known for his visual research unraveling unknown facts about evolution using time-lapse photography, and his “visual essay” seeking a mechanism to differentiate the cells of cellular slime molds was internationally acclaimed. He died on February 23, 2006, just before his 100th birthday.
Major works:Youth Corps, Defenders of the Skies (1942), Nagasaki Children (1949), Shirohata-jiisan (1952), Silent Battle: The Life of the Pine Moth (1955), The Sakuma Line (1956), The World of Vitamin B1 (1958), The Joy of Science (1958–60), Camera and Shutter (1960), Secret in the Hive (1962), M.I.B. Machine (1964), Nature and Tradition in Shikoku (1965), Thinkin’ in the Rain (1966), The Dynamic Flow of Life: An Investigation of the Wonders of the Blood (1967), Nara and Yamato (1968), Ukiyoe (1969), Experiments on Microorganisms(1970), Cultural Treasures along the Wayside (1974), Journey in East Germany (1975), Building on the Rock: A Record of the Construction of the Ikata Nuclear Power Plant (1978), Shiitake (1980), The Life Cycle of Cellular Slime Mold (1982), Nonaka Kenzan: The River Flows On (1987), Kukai, Great Teacher of the Buddhist Law (1988), Behavior and Differentiation of Cellular Slime Mold (1991), The Life History of True Slime Molds (1997), Symbiosis between Fungi and Plants (1999), The World of Mushrooms (2001)
[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.
Transnistra 14:00- 19:00- (screens twice)
Transnistra
YIDFF 2019 International Competition
Dir: Anna Eborn / SWEDEN, DENMARK, BELGIUM / 2019 / 96 min
●notes
On the border between Ukraine And Moldova lies a small country called Transnistria that declared its independence in 1990. Seventeen-year-old Tania spends a summer in riversides, forests and ruined buildings among five boys who fight over her. Brief, radiant moments in which friendship vies dangerously with love are documented by the camera on 16mm film. As the emotional lives of the young people fluctuate back and forth between anxiety about the future and the comfort they find in the natural outdoor environment of their hometown. A migrant worker, a soldier, or an outlaw: these are their only choices. Faced with the harshness of reality, the season of youth—which seemed everlasting—is sipped away by the sky.
Transnistra
●Director’s Statement
My latest movie takes place in Transnistria—also known as Priednestrovia—a young and not yet recognized country situated in the north of Moldova, bordering Ukraine and formed in the early 1990s as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union. I asked myself how the generation born in the nineties might feel about growing up in a Soviet – inspired system that the surrounding countries turned their backs to. Going there, I realized that even if some traditions are as old as the monuments of Lenin, the young people in Transnistria today are much more influenced by modern Russia than the old Soviet state: they listen to modern Russian pop and some are even fans of Putin. And even though some don’t seem to care about the political situation at all, almost everyone I met was proud to be a Transnistrian.
During may first research I met a very special group of friends. The dynamics of the group—five boys and one girl—were extremely fascinating. I wanted them to be the center of the movie. Through them, I wanted to catch the search for first love, with seventeen-year-old Tanya right in the middle of it all. The group spends most of their time outside: by the river trying to learn how to swim or climbing the facades of abandoned buildings, throwing stones through open holes in walls where windows were never installed. They are moving inside unfinished architecture and the ever-changing mood of one young person’s heart inspired me towards a narrative with a free architecture and order. During summer, the arrival of their own adulthood is postponed. But the further we go into the movie and as the months pass by, the friends are confronted by society. Each in their own way, they are measured by the adult world to see to what extent they fit the norms of society.
Anna Eborn
Transnistra
Living Amongst Lions 16:00-(single screening)
Living Amongst Lions
YIDFF ’99 International Competition, Citizens’ Prize
Dir: Sigve Endresen / NORWAY / 1998 / 83 min
●notes：
Living Amongst Lions records 18 months in the lives of three young people ravaged by cancer. Centering on 27-year-old Ingunn, 21-year-olds Lars and Kristin, and their friends, the film questions the value of life and the meaning of living through the thoughts and emotions of these three young people who face death together while still in their youth. “The best part of my life has come after being diagnosed with cancer,” words of one of the three, lie heavily over the film. What suffering and disappointments accompany the knowledge that one has only a short time to come to terms with the journey towards death, especially when that knowledge is the background to light-hearted conversations with friends, crazy antics, travel, marriage and other scenes that could be from any young person’s life? A documentary filmmaker since 1978, Sigve Endresen reconstructs the evidence of these young people’s lives and delineates the meanings of life and death as he follows their hopes and disappointments, dreams and realities, peace and difficulties. As disclosed at the end of the film, the title comes from Karen Blixen’s novel Out of Africa. Its meaning? Only those who face their own death are truly free.
Living Amongst Lions
●Director’s Statement
“Did this really have to happen, in order for me to know, feel and understand the meaning of life”
(Cancer patient)
Those who say, “I am going to die,” are suddenly alone. Most of us go about our lives thinking we are immortal. But by being alienated from death, we are also alienated from life. And it is not at all atypical, that we first learn to take life seriously the day we discover we are going to die. Death provokes change.
I have wanted to make a film about death for a long time. About the paradox that death gives meaning to life. And about how, by banishing death, by hiding it away in institutions, we lose an important perspective on life. I have tried to make a film about death that can be an affirmation and tribute to life. Living Amongst Lions refers back to a scene from Karen Blixen’s novel Out of Africa. She describes an episode where several oxen have been killed by lions, and her foreman suggests that they should poison one of the dead oxen, so that when the lions come to eat, they will die from the poisoned meat. Karen Blixen says that the lions should not be poisoned; they should be shot. When the foreman asserts that this is too dangerous and he doesn’t dare, Karen Blixen replies, “Only that which can die, is truly free.” Then she goes on a lion hunt.
I have followed several young people who have been diagnosed with cancer and told they are going to die. I have stayed with them through their process of learning to “live amongst lions.” For me this is a film about their experiences, crises, growth and reflections, that can teach us quite a bit about what life is all about.
Sigve Endresen
Living Amongst Lions
[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)
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