On paper, the three shortest films in the 2021 Yamagata Documentary International Film Festival may seem the furthest away from each other: with each filmmaker hailing from three different film schools in three different countries. But upon further examination, these filmmakers each craft a story that attempts to make sense of a violent milieu, and the results of what they’ve captured become a potent source of discussion. When screened together as a 39-minute triptych, the selection becomes a poignant mosaic that reflects and refracts truths about displacement, isolation, and political negligence in the increasingly divided and globalized world.
The first of the films, Chang Yu-sung’s Entropy, observes a dying coal mine in Poland on its last leg of operations. The black-and-white images of machines, minerals, and men slowly fade into one another, constantly transforming, paralleling the changes in the topography made by the industry. In creating visual overlaps between the environment and its occupants, the film merges the destroyer and the destroyed, becoming a surprising form of self-mutilation by humans onto the mountain.
Deprived of dialogue, the film uses a heavy soundscape—whispers in the air, static from the radio, the pitter-patter of a flurry of pebbles falling—reminiscent of the sustained, anxiety-inducing humming that underscores every successful horror film. A disorienting yet eerie synesthetic experience, Entropy creates fractals of the mining industry, turning landscape and all its components into visual snowflakes, symbols of pollution. Previously the ninth largest coal producer in the world, Poland has begun phasing out its mines in solidarity with climate and health movements. But as the film concludes, as the screen fades to white and the sound of a heartbeat stops, we are reminded that the death of the industry also means a death of the people who rely on it.
The second of the films, Taymour Boulos’s It’s Just Another Dragon, is much harder to decode than the first. Divided into eight chapters, a prologue and an epilogue, the film follows an unseen Hungarian oral storyteller and a Lebanese filmmaker who entrust each other with their stories. Each chapter is a series of static shots: a river flowing, a subway station, a nearly empty tanning salon, the Chinese Dragon created by Gábor Miklós Szőke, the platform lifts at a Hungarian railway station, a pair of fencers dueling, three girls practicing a dance routine in front of a store’s glass window, an image of a king’s epitaph, a pingpong game, an eerie park in the nighttime, and a man in a cloak burning wood in the forest.
Perusing the internet reveals that dragons have had a drastic change in meaning in Hungarian literature. Initially a symbol of unity that was, in some regions, born through the transformation of another being, these later on became a symbol of evil to be vanquished. However, in postmodern Hungarian literature, the dragon is no longer treated like any beast but rather as a delicate and emotional being or, at times, an outcast.
The visuals are layered with a rhythmic form of oral storytelling from the two protagonists, each narrating their backgrounds: the 1970s civil war that caused the rail transport system in Lebanon to cease, the 2020 ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut, the ethnic conflicts between Hungary and Romania. The images are peaceful compared to the stories being told, stuffing the voiceovers with an almost fairytale-like quality. The epilogue acknowledges that the subjects are aware that they are being filmed, consenting to the process of retelling these stories, a dialogue across space and time.
The final film, Nan Khin San Win’s Broken, is the most straightforward of the three: both in its narrative and its form. Taking on many elements of traditional documentary filmmaking, it gives a voice and a body to the people, specifically the women, in the Kayah State—survivors of domestic, economic, and sexual violence due to the area’s intense militarization. Fathers step on landmines, statues are defaced and damaged, girls are safeguarded to no avail. Even in their sleep, they dream of violence, their subconscious absorbing and manifesting the violence around them.
War reveals itself differently to men and to women, and they relish their momentary sources of peace: sitting on tree stumps in the middle of clearings created through deforestation, submerging themselves in the river, or lying down in the mud until there is a need to get up. Their behaviors and self-perceptions as individuals and as a community have inevitably changed. And though wounds of the body heal over time, the wounds of the spaces and the mind stay forever. Escape here is seen as an impossible salvation, but to a certain extent, filmmaking is itself a form of escaping the local environment. Storytelling to a camera that is willing to listen can offer comfort, even if it is momentary, to a troubled soul and a troubled body.
In a way, the triptych is a reminder that documenting tragedies has value because it humanizes the subjects and creates an opportunity not only to empathize, but to educate ourselves and to act. But in order to narrate the tragedies with our lives and in the lives of others, we must survive them first. And the process of surviving and narrating the story enables some kind of freedom too.
Freedom fighters trapped inside an enclosed place for days struggle to find escape routes to avoid being sieged, caught, then arrested by state forces for rioting against the fascist Empire. For a documentary that actually documents real-world events for its entirety with no fiction in its skin, Inside the Red Brick Wall is more riveting than the typical Hollywood action or sci-fi dystopian movie.
The “freedom fighters” are the protesting Hong Kong people; the “fascist Empire” is China. The reason for the protests is the extradition bill that China imposed onto Hong Kong, violating the latter’s sovereignty. The Hong Kong people blocked public roads to protest this bill until they were crowded by the police and made to retreat inside a university. The setting is during the event called the Siege of the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong last November 2019 inside the university itself.
The drama is that hundreds of the protesters are trapped inside the university, and throughout the documentary, they must find ways to find an escape because of dwindling supplies and fears of arrest (or worse, of rape and death) from the police. Some climb down a bridge using rope, some go under sewers, some voluntarily surrender to the police. The last minutes see all the protesters concoct a final desperate grand chase away from the university, through the police, and towards sympathizers willing to help them. The film builds up to the carrying-out of this plan, but the documentary ends just as it starts to happen. We don’t see what comes next save for some text on the screen counting the number of total arrests and injuries.
The documentary consists of on-ground and first hand footage by journalists and participants from the side of the protesters. Because of the proximity, the danger is palpable. Anxiety is heavily felt. Emotions run high. Fully armored and fully armed police shoot their rubber bullets and water cannons at protesters with their makeshift gear and umbrellas used for shields. The Polytechnic University of Hong Kong is turned into a battlefield. Bodies litter the grounds, battered but never defeated in spirit. This is a war film. But this is real life. Which makes it journalism.
Journalism is frequently misconceived as needing to be unbiased. In reality, it has no such need, and part of the rigor of Inside the Red Brick Wall is that it unabashedly takes the side of the protesters. No time is wasted on presenting the side of the state. Nor should it be. The omission is partly pragmatic, since the documentarists are the protesters themselves, but the more important reason is that Inside the Red Brick Wall as a political documentary is the platform to air out sentiments repressed by the state. Traditional media is already peddling the popular narratives. Grassroots documentary filmmaking is the space allocated for subversion.
Another important facet of the documentary is that it is not the work of one filmmaker, but of multiple people. No singular person is named or given the sole credit. Collectivity trumps the personal—such is the organization for mass action that gets things done. This solidifies a movement that extends from the streets to film.
There are few times when we can quietly stop to appreciate our surroundings. Sohn Koo-Yong’s latest film is an opportunity to rethink the world around us, pointing out the sublime in even the most quiet of settings. Departing from the cold, monochrome, and alienating urban expanse of the city that featured in his YIDFF 2019 offering, Winter in Seoul, the director turns his camera to the warmer and more vibrant space of a rural town not far from the mountains, stopping to observe the finest details of the picturesque streets sprawling with greenery and a nostalgic charm. Sohn continues to develop his filmic language in Afternoon Landscape, experimenting further with cinema’s marriage of images, words, and sounds. This time, he has kept only a sliver of plot to give the audience a more immersive experience in the environment of his film, an exercise that has implications both for his filmic world and for the real world that he captures with his lens.
We find ourselves deeply invested in the landscape through the filmic style, which focuses on picturesque scenes of the everyday that resemble the most intricate of landscape paintings. The camera frames these spaces around town with wide shots, taking in an expansive space that often dwarfs the people who enter the frame, and with deep focus that avoids highlighting a particular focal point. Immersive not just in its presentation of space, Afternoon Landscape also creates a meditative and immersive atmosphere through time: long takes with a stationary camera that focus on a single spot long enough to feel like we are part of the scenery. Although we usually see residents going about their daily chores, passing time, or preparing for work, we also watch a nameless girl holding a camera, whom the film does not so much follow as encounter during its journey. She rests on some steps, approaches a pool of fresh water, and, of course, snaps the shutter of the camera from time to time. Sohn does not simply observe, however, but excels in composing his shots in a way that he creates beauty in this town that seems to be stuck in time. His obsession with capturing the amount of nature that still flourishes in the town is evident in shots lush with vibrant greens that juxtapose with the architecture in the small town.
But the implications of this immersive experience are multiple, and perhaps the most important is the way that it locates Sohn as a filmmaker in the documentary tradition. While his previous short films have had loose links to the documentary genre, the focus on less narrative and more observation gives the scenes in Afternoon Landscape a dual role: they support the diegetic world and record the spaces of the town in this particular moment in time. It is the latter function I want to turn my focus toward, because I think that Sohn makes an interesting statement about how documenting is not simply observation and that aesthetics do not function solely for the viewer’s enjoyment. His film plays an active role in contributing to a documenting of a place and a time, capturing not just scenic views of the everyday but the aging residents of the town as they go about mundane tasks in their daily lives. The deep focus erodes a focus on character and has the effect of integrating the townsfolk into their environment, itself serving as a telling document of space and the heterogeneous elements that comprise it.
This may even be an urgent concern for the places we see in the film, although we are not certain. Do the construction workers, hauling equipment in the middle of a hot summer day, draw attention to development (or demolition) projects in the area? What are we to think of the giant wall of ivy in the background, that dominates this scene and seems on the verge of engulfing the men? Or maybe we can look at the older women toward the end of the film who seem to watch the city in the distance, foreshadowing urban development’s eventual encroaching on the very area where they are sitting. Or even the absence of nature as we begin to move closer to the nearby city, where the greenery that had populated the majority of shots up until that point begins to fade from the screen. Instead, we are left with flora that are much less natural: potted plants spilling out onto the concrete of urban streets instead of large foliage that towers overhead. But the ephemeral nature of the town is only subtle when implied, and the director seems less focused on directing our concerns to it than on creating a meditative experience where we can tour the town leisurely, just like the protagonist and her camera.
Further evoking a sense of nostalgia are pages of what looks like chalk drawings of the town as well as poems that serve as intertitles, sometimes interrupting the flow of these landscape shots. These might suggest that we are guided to the spaces by the director himself, who is traveling through a town of his own memories and wants to archive them as a personal project. But it is also likely that, like the girl with the camera, he is also simply an observer, who happened upon the places in the film by chance, capturing what he can with his camera.
As I see the town around me change drastically every day, with houses and buildings torn down and others put up at a rapid pace, I understand the motivation behind documenting the spaces of this film. Landscapes like these too often fade from memory without leaving behind a trace. Sohn seems to see the potential of cinema not just to capture moments but to preserve them.
The last of the aurochs, a type of bovine considered an ancestor to modern cattle, went extinct centuries ago, but interest in the animal has hardly waned. In their latest film, Her Name Was Europa (a reference to the goddess of the same name in Greek myth who was tricked into riding an aurochs which was actually Zeus in disguise), Berlin-based filmmakers Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy (who collectively go by OJOBOCA) seek out recent efforts by scientists, geneticists, and enthusiasts to revive the animal, which once roamed the forests and plains of Europe. But theirs is no ordinary nature film, as the aurochs is not your typical animal. Much of what we know about the aurochs is steeped in mystery, and the directors choose a visual and narrative style that diverges from typical nature documentaries. It becomes clear throughout the film just how much of what we know about the aurochs stems from pure guesswork. What we see is the extent of mankind’s interventions in the revival and reimagining of a species as well as the ideological motives behind them.
The film begins by introducing the last successful breeding of an aurochs-like bovine by Lutz Heck, a scientist working for the Nazi regime. It becomes apparent that the revival of the lost breed was only part of a larger nationalist project that saw the aurochs as part of a romanticized past, a national identity. His crossbred specimens were wiped out during the final years of WWII, but efforts have been made by numerous organization to revive the aurochs and bring the breed—or at least something close to the breed—back to life again to repopulate the forests and plains of Europe. Are these modern projects linked to a similar motivation? The filmmakers do not explicitly say, but they do call attention to how we might begin to think of what lies behind modern aurochs research. Is it simply science, an effort to restore nature, or are the motivations behind research into the natural world tinged with something more?
With no real visual evidence of the species, the film focuses in on how much of the project involves questions about the breed’s appearance. Experts can only hypothesize and debate over what it may have looked like, and many disagree with each other. Decisions about the appearance affect how geneticists approach the project as well. We see many models of the aurochs throughout the film, all differing slightly, made in the image of their creators. The filmmakers pay close attention to these images, framing these recreations as we hear informative conversations in the background: a compact 3-D printed model, a sketch by an illustrator and specialist, and finally, a massive aurochs sculpture crafted to scale by an expert sculptor. The latter is the largest and most ambitious project, which we see assembled from the base up and headless at one point as it is assembled before our eyes. The massive aurochs statue is then seen being hoisted out of a truck and set in the forest, ironically juxtaposing this fake creature with the backdrop of a natural world. We will probably never know if this fierce, towering bull is indeed the aurochs, or if the creature was more like the compact, nondescript cattle the illustrator suggests.
Aside from its focus on the constructed image of the aurochs, Her Name is Europa is also a self-reflexive exercise in the constructed nature of cinema itself. Shot with 16mm black-and-white film stock, the directors do not hide the cinematic artifice from the viewer, revealing the assembled nature of a film at many junctures. Instead of digitally inserted text, a pair of hands are seen at the sides of the frame sliding sheets of text in front of the camera that serve as intertitles. The materiality of the film stock itself is made candid when the film alerts us to a mishap in some footage taken at a genetics lab which had been soiled and ruined during transport. This is filmed a second time, on different film stock, and we are shown what remains of the soiled original take before being shown the new footage. The directors note how the lab staff were kind enough to “reenact” their procedures—what we are seeing is, of course, never “the real thing”—for the camera just as they had done before. In breaking with cinematic immersion and reminding viewers of the fourth wall, the film seems to address the typical nature documentary’s claims to knowledge that are embedded in the cinematic form. This acceptance of film’s materiality reinforces the idea that its subject, the aurochs, is also a synthetic construct. In reminding us of the fragility and artifice of film, we also question everything we are told about the aurochs, destabilizing our understanding of the complex creature.
Then there is the ending of the film, where it is revealed that the fictional sequence planned for the finale will not go ahead as planned. Instead, we see shots of the directors lounging on the bizarre locale selected for the axed final scenes: a bizarre indoor tropical resort that was constructed out of a scrapped military project. This plastic South Seas experience, we are reminded, is a hollow cash grab. In this large dome-like structure foreign investors play god by building a tropical paradise much like how in laboratories they recreate extinct creatures.
The final shots of the revived aurochs breed make for a bizarre end to the labyrinth of questions and debates posed about the creature. The creature of so much mystery is finally revealed: living, breathing, eating, and watching the camera, watching us. There is no subsequent finale, no further reveal, because seeing these creatures in the flesh, without the baggage of mankind’s intervention, is perhaps the only way to end a film that has said so much about artificiality.
The making of Inside the Red Brick Wall, an impressive joint effort of Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers Collective, is bravery—so brave and real that the film has been banned from public screenings in Hong Kong due to the influence of pro-Beijing forces in the city. Turning away from cherry-picked information, Inside the Red Brick Wall preserves the anonymity of both the subjects and the filmmakers to shed unabashed light on the side often dismissed by the controlled media. To hail it as the trailblazer of modern reportage, or a powerful insider’s documentation of the Siege of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, is indeed still an understatement: the film is a comprehensive perusal of human emotions at the nadir of order—the unrest within ourselves when surrounded by extreme adversity.
The situation: protesters blocked Cross-Harbour Tunnel and established the university as their base. The Hong Kong Police Force soon laid siege to the campus, but the protesters’ objective was clear: they wouldn’t surrender unless the Hong Kong extradition bill was lifted. Weapons used: firearms, petrol bombs, rubber bullets, water cannons with chemical irritants, etc., with the least violent one being music, “Fuck the Po-po” vs. “Surrounded” and “Ambush from Ten Sides.” Confined in the university, the protesters met with difficult decisions about whether to flee home, to wait for help, or to surrender. Those who tried to escape were arrested and faced unknown consequences.
At YIDFF this year, there were two galvanizing documentaries—this film and Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege by Abdallah Al-Khatib—that provide an insider perspective of activists and innocent civilians under siege. Though both are heart-wrenching and insightful, they take two entirely different approaches. While the latter is a poetic account of a single filmmaker with humble agency (he almost got shot while filming), the former compiles multi-sourced observational footage. The camera-holders, acutely aware of their safety and privilege under their neon-green “PRESS” jackets, aspire to present the scenes without filters: there are no on-site interviews, no voice-over (only occasional captions), no representative leaders or characters; there are only raw clamors for action, motivation speeches, impulsive movements, sounds of despair… spray-painted on tattered walls, or striking from somewhere amidst the buzzing crowd, a mass of digitally blurred faces that seem to merge as one. It’s also noteworthy here that the word protesters use to address each other, subtitled as “mates,” is 手足 in Chinese, which literally means “arm-and-leg” and is also one of the most recognizable keywords of the anti-ELAB movement.
Mobilizing as “arm-and-leg”—as one, the protesters swear to stick together till the end. However, the conflict soon swerves from external, between protesters and police, to an internal one among the besieged due to a number of factors, notably, dwindling supplies, failed escape attempts, and unhindered police brutality. Mistrust, doubts, fears, disappointment, and anger quickly emerge. The trigger point that threatens to break apart the unit is when a group of middle-school principals-delegates enter to help “whoever willing” to leave the site. This sequence ends with an extended shot filmed from higher ground, showing a long line of people leaving Poly U, head-down, against their mates’ implorations. The protesters are “ready to die,” but still tear up at the thought of a futile sacrifice. They’re stricken with guilt for surrendering, but they “have no choice.” We hear tactics being proposed immediately followed by tearful objections—altogether representing exactly what happens in an anxiety-attacked mind: voices from all directions and distracting conjectures assail our core beliefs, dissolving the solid principles that have been echoing in everyone, separately or together. This plexus of emotional responses describes a full range of human emotions, stripped bare: in normal situations, they’re under checks and balances; in turmoil, they’re all turned inside out, flashing at the same time. As “arm-and-leg,” the protesters aren’t in conflict with each other. They’re in conflict with themselves.
The filmmakers’ observational approach and a near absolute exclusion of external footage (news, protesters’ recordings, live streams…) also further this analysis—or critique—of the complex human emotions embodied in the mass. This frenzy, if as real as it was recorded on these unobtrusive press cameras, could it be one of the causal factors for the failure of the protest? What could be the inescapable downsides of functioning as “arm-and-leg,” as a singular body? On screen, there are not only the protesting and escaping in action, but also moments of weakness: a single Vans shoe foregrounding flaming debris; protesters folding their bodies against hard grounds out of exhaustion; heaps of broken furniture stacking into a fragile fortress; fire-alarm water sprinkling down in an abandoned classroom, textured by flickering light. Sentiments consolidated by collective fighting spirit still leave room for weariness and disappointment, something that can be shared, nominally, by many but only experienced in solitary. Amidst high-strung disorder, the mass, representative of a body, is vulnerable to a mental disorder and some internal aberrations that malfunction the working of its system, and is bound to break down, similarly to the deteriorating state of their base or the plunge in energy of individuals as the film goes on. In the space between dots of an ellipsis, the audiovisual elements behave with montage intentions to coalesce into a physiological body that is itself the protesters, the “arm-and-leg” incarnate.
Departing from the “terror porn” or supercuts of the extremes often disseminated by the media to deaden our senses—surely, they know how addicted humans are to stimulation—Inside the Red Brick Wall is an antithesis of the kind of procedures we often see in a typical political reportage and which are guilty of our epistemological crisis (selective testimonies, indulging political populists…) We immerse ourselves in the insiders’ atmosphere, but are constantly reminded not to turn the struggles into a spectacle or to contemplate our viewing position. Not only do we watch the film, but it also watches us, elucidating the emotional maelstrom that is human to everyone but often obscured behind glorified, sensational content.
Left-wing organizations and their struggles for social change have always held an important place in Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. After all, one of the awards is named after the great political documentarian Ogawa Shinsuke. And no movie in this year’s festival program reminds us better of that than Whiplash of the Dead, Daishima Haruhiko’s three-and-a-half-hour opus about the death of the Kyoto University student and radical left-wing organization Chukaku member Yamazaki Hiroaki during the First Haneda Incident on October 8, 1967.
The outlines of what happened on that day are well known to everyone even vaguely interested in Japanese countercultures or alternative cinema and music. The protesting students blocking Benten bridge, leading to Haneda Airport. The fights between the helmet-wearing and pole-wielding Chukaku faction and the police. The death of Yamazaki Hiroaki. The numerous other clashes, usually called incidents or struggles, between the radical left-wing student organizations and the government. All these images, each of them so ingrained in our memories through the work of photographers like Watanabe Hiromi and Kitai Kazuo and directors like Wakamatsu Koji.
All this renders making a new movie on this topic a difficult undertaking. But Daishima Haruhiko is not a director who is afraid to tackle such subjects. His previous two documentaries are about the Narita Airport protests, a struggle (continuing up to the present day) by villagers and students against the Japanese government, a topic associated by many with Ogawa Shinsuke’s best-known works.
Similarly to his previous films about Narita, Daishima chooses to tell the story through long and minimally edited talking-head interviews with a large pool of interviewees. And by long, I really mean long. Some of the interviews continue for many minutes without a single cut. Sometimes we see the director’s hand coming into frame or hear him prod the people he speaks with, most of them members of Chukaku, all of them friends of Yamazaki. And when he does, or when cherished memories of their friend and the time they spent together organizing protests and demos appear, or, later, when they have to think of the day he died, they grow quiet. Sometimes for a long time. While other directors might choose to cut those moments away, “hiding” them with archival footage, Daishima does the exact opposite. Instead, he seems to linger on them, knowing that it is precisely through these moments of intense quiet we can see how much Yamazaki Hiroaki meant for his friends and for the Left as a whole. At times, it is difficult to watch, especially when we see his older brother remembering the day he saw his young brother’s corpse, or when a previously talkative friend stands on the bridge, unable to say much. It is very intimate and raw and hard to endure.
Whiplash of the Dead isn’t only about Yamazaki’s life and his untimely death on Benten Bridge. It is as equally a film about Chukaku and the militant left after his passing. This we see not only from the fact that it is divided into two parts of somewhat equal length (titled “Part 1” and “Part 2” in English and with the kanji for up and down in Japanese), but also from its original title, After You Died. Thus, the movie becomes more about what happened after Yamazaki’s passing than what led to it. To be more precise, what happens with the organization and their struggle for a revolution. And as all of the interviewees say, it all becomes corrupt. The organization they have dedicated their youth to becomes dictatorial and petty, fighting for power with other militant groups rather than a social revolution against the government. So, all of them quit. Most of them less than a year after his passing. They simply couldn’t endure it.
Reaching the end of this long and emotionally draining documentary, the kanji used to title the two parts start to make much more sense. Yamazaki’s death is not simply the first of many in the continued clashes between the protesters and the police. He is not just an unlucky young man fallen victim to police brutality. Rather, he is a martyr whose death is a watershed moment for the radical left movement. He even seems to have gone to the bridge with the idea of sacrificing himself for the revolution, as a letter his brother shares with us seems to imply. And yet, instead of leading to a revolution, his death leads to the movement falling into a downward spiral of decay and unnecessary violence. As such, Yamazaki Hiroaki represents the highest point of the radical left struggle for change, and his self-sacrifice might have been in vain.
Daishima bookends the film with two long takes of himself. He is standing on Benten Bridge on a rainy autumn day. It is probably October 8th. He is holding a large framed photograph of Yamazaki Hiroaki in front of his torso. It is the same photograph used at his funeral. Daishima is wearing the same student uniform as the young man. The physical outlines of director and subject start to blur. The entire time, there is a dissonant and loud jazz-tinged improv freakout by turntablist Otomo Yoshihide. In this numbing noise we realize that though the radical left organizations might have failed us, the struggle for revolution didn’t die with them, and it will never will. As such, Yamazaki Hiroaki’s death is not and never will be in vain.
Inside and Outside of the Rectangular Screen | Hata Ayumi
The Pilgrims Find Their Way | Philip Cheah
Beyond a Sense of Interruption | Ogawa Naoto
What’s Lost, What’s Passed On: A Place Called Komian Club | Okuyama Shinichiro
Film Juries Are Not All the Same | Mark Schilling
A Bizarre and Disquieting Journey for Cattle: Her Name Was Europa | Kusakabe Katsuyoshi
Only Love: Miguel’s War | Yoshida Miwa
Yamagata, à la carte (1): Kaminohata-yaki Ware, Ginzan | Ishigooka Manabu
Drawing | Roxlee
No.2
The Land Becomes the Gun: Nuclear Family | Markus Nornes
Curiosity and Discoveries | Edwin
An Ethnography of a Family Called Camagroga and Their Land | Interview with Alfonso Amador
Listening to Women’s Voices: Night Shot and Broken | Atsumi Yoshiko
Yamagata, à la carte (2): The Fruit and Wine of Woody Farm & Winery | Inoue Yoko
For Nameless Fragments of History: Whiplash of the Dead | Iwatsuki Ayumi
No.3
These Women’s Media: This Stained Dawn, Writing With Fire, and Makeup Artist | Izuno Chita
Fear, Power and Fairy Tale—The Folk Memory 2020:Self-Portrait: Fairy Tale in 47 KM and Luo Luo’s Fear | Gao Ang
The Moroccan Art Scene of the Seventies Regained | Interview with Ali Essafi
Yamagata, à la carte (3): Candied Ume Plums by Kotobukiya Jukogura | Toda Takeshi
Cinema’s Reach | Jay Rosas
Gathering Place: The Playground Cafe BOX Initiative | Okuyama Shinichiro
Drawing | Roxlee
No.4
Coordinators: Looking for Ways of Being Together After the Great East Japan Earthquake | Miura Tetsuya
Memories of Occupation, Memories of a Lost City:The First 54 Years—An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation and Little
Palestine, Diary of a Siege | Abe Koji
Language to Live Together | Interview with Nishino Madoka
Youth and Solitude | Interview with Claire Simon
2021 and BYT | Maeda Shinjiro
Yamagata, à la carte (4): Fresh Noodles from Sakai Noodles | Suzuki Nobuo
No.5
Fear’s Place in Political Struggle: Inside the Red Brick Wall and Fear(less) and Dear | Cameron L. White
Without Averting Our Gaze From the Dying | Farida Pacha
Vietnam’s Exported Laborers: Behind The Lucky Woman and Dorm | Akiba Ako
A Signpost for the Journey to Come: Toward “Yamagata and Film” | Kuroki Aruji
Yamagata, à la carte (5): Okuyama Meriyasu Knitwear | Umeki Soichi
Children Before the Dawn: Notturno | Tanaka Shinpei
Fiction for Themselves: Notturno | Tanaka Ryosuke
No.6
“We’re Going to Be Mayor!”: City Hall | Yuki Hidetake
From Skepticism to Affirmation: City Hall | Chris Fujiwara
The Year of the (Re-)Discovery | Interview with Luis López Carrasco
Between Memory and Record, Between “Me” and the Public: Soup and Ideology | Ishizaka Kenji
A Simple Air of Wildness: Nude at Heart | Muto Daisuke
Yamagata, à la carte (6): Learning about Local Specialties from Local Mascots | Yoshino Michiko
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