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<p class="ydp739ff797MsoNormal">Here’s a report from Nippon Connection 20 which concluded
recently. It is necessarily selective and other list-members are welcome to add
or disagree.</p>
<p class="ydp739ff797MsoNormal" style="margin-top:6.0pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none">As previous posts have mentioned, the festival was held entirely online,
necessarily, of course, due to ongoing Covid-19 restrictions.</p>
<p class="ydp739ff797MsoNormal" style="margin-top:6.0pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none">The first thing to say is that it worked – 70 or so films were made
available online via a payment system, and a range of other events were
streamed to keep alive the many non-film strands of the traditional festival (if that is the right word for a 20-year-old event). I only hooked up to a
couple of the talks which allowed some interaction through a ‘chat’ board,
spending what time I had available searching out the films. The Vimeo streaming
was entirely without glitches, the website information and links were accurate
and the distributors can be assured that the country restrictions also worked –
when I mistakenly selected ‘Nippon Visions shorts’ in stead of ‘Nippon Docs
shorts., I was barred.</p>
<p class="ydp739ff797MsoNormal" style="margin-top:6.0pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none">I have no inside information from the Festival but I can imagine the
organization would be a struggle in any circumstances, particularly negotiating
and implementing the country restrictions. I can only guess what films are
missing entirely because distributors were too difficult or uncontactable. List-members
won’t need telling that many Japanese distributors have unrealistic ideas of
how marketable their films are abroad but I would have thought those that
decided to take what was on offer made the smarter move.</p>
<p class="ydp739ff797MsoNormal" style="margin-top:6.0pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none">And so to some of the films I saw. Although I concentrated on the
documentaries, the ones I caught elsewhere were rewarding. The mainstream, ‘Cinema’
strand was the most restricted outside Germany, but I’d liked the previous film
I had seen here by <span>ŌKU Akiko and <i><span style="color:black">My Sweet Grappa Remedies</span></i> </span><span style="font-family:"MS Mincho";mso-fareast-language:JA" lang="JA">甘いお酒でうがい </span><span>proved to be another well-made, sensitive
entertainment film. The script, </span><span>from
his own novel</span>,<span> was by </span><span>ŌKAWARA Jirō<span>
</span>- the ‘Jirō’ half of the duo SISSONE – who had also adapted Ōku’s
previous film. She also used music by TAKANO Masaki, which I found intelligent
and thrifty – qualities not always evident in Japanese entertainment films.
It’s at least the third time she has used Takano and she seems to be building
up a team.</span></p>
<p class="ydp739ff797MsoNormal" style="margin-top:6.0pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none">In the ‘Visions’ section, the one character of the title, <span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"MS Mincho";mso-fareast-language:JA" lang="JA">燕</span><span>is to be read as ‘<i>Yan</i>’. But </span><span>the child in the
story, adamantly says to his Taiwanese mother, that his name is to be </span><span>said, japanese, as </span><span>‘Tsubame’, and not </span><span>the chinese ‘</span><span>Yan’. In flash-back sequences, a relationship
between a young child and his mother breaks down under the cultural oppression
of his need not to be a nail sticking up in the Japanese school system. The
main story portrays the grown-up Tsubame/Yan making contact with his estranged
elder brother in </span><span>Kaohsiung</span><span>. It was the
debut directorship of the photographer </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black">IMAMURA Keisuke from a script by </span><span>WASHIZU Noriko, for whom I can trace no
other credits. Imamura could have let his excellent actors express without some
of the photographic over-emphasis but It touched all sorts of buttons for me,
in contrast with a set-up in Japan which, in contrast, I found flawed.</span></p>
<p style="margin-top:6.0pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:0cm;margin-left:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none"><span style="font-family:Arial">Also in the ‘Visions’ section, </span><span style="font-family:"MS Mincho";mso-ascii-font-family:Arial;mso-hansi-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-language:JA" lang="JA">おろかもの</span><span style="font-family:Arial"> I think means ‘the thing/things we don’t talk about’
but the english rendering spits it out: ‘<i>Me and My Brother’s Mistress</i>’.
That ‘me’ is a 17-year-old younger sister of a brother already in the business
world. Between domestic and walking episodes, character and story are developed
by a series of duologues between sister, brother, his fiancée and his mistress.
If that sounds Rohmerian, the brash and extrovert ending is somewhere else – I thought
a subversion of a classic American film, but I won’t spoil it further, although
the publicity still does. It was jointly made by two directors, <span style="color:black">HAGA Takashi and SUZUKI Shō with script by NUMATA Masataka,
all names new to me.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-top:6.0pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:0cm;margin-left:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none"><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">Is there a film-school director in </span><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">Japan</span><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black"> who’s a special admirer of Rohmer ?<span> </span><i>Minori, on the Brink</i> </span><span style="font-family:"MS Mincho";mso-fareast-language:JA" lang="JA">お嬢ちゃん</span><span style="font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-language:JA">, is not only built around
duologues and walking scenes, it’s opening and closing shots are on the beach.
it’s star, </span><span style="font-family:Arial">HAGIWARA Minori convinces as
a 20-year-old frustrated at her dead-end social world, but a series of minor
parts are acted without a trace of cliché. I didn’t catch the previous film of <span style="color:black">NINOMIYA Ryūtarō, which got to </span></span><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">Locarno</span><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black"> but this is very well made and full of
sharp observation. He clearly had a tightly conceived script before he started.</span></p>
<p style="margin-top:6.0pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:0cm;margin-left:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none"><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">It was a documentary, <i>An Ant Strikes
Back</i>, that won the Nippon Online award. It tells a story of a drawn-out
battle between one employee who refuses to be bullied out of a job, and the
‘Busy Ant’ removal company, Arisan Māku Hikkoshi-sha. At the end of the film, I
particularly missed a Q&A which, in normal years, are a particular strength
of this strand, as NC often gets both the maker and the subject of the film to
be present. I had a couple of questions which would probably have been answered
before I had to ask and which would likely have cleared my queries. The
japanese title, </span><span style="font-family:"MS Mincho";mso-fareast-language:JA" lang="JA">アリ地獄天国</span><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">, ‘Ant hell &
heaven’, gets a bit closer to the point, but I didn’t see the heaven. I would
think the company would be quite comfortable showing the film to recruits, in
support of their programme of intimidation against all resistance. The film, by
TSUCHIYA Tokachi, after all, reports that not a single member of their
workforce had joined the ‘Precariat’, or any other independent union.</span></p>
<p style="margin-top:6.0pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:0cm;margin-left:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none"><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">Only after watching </span><i><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">Prison Circle</span></i><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">, did I realize that its maker, SAKAGAMI
Kaori, although born in </span><span style="font-family: Arial;color:black">Ōsaka</span><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">, had made two previous documentaries on prisoner programmes
in the </span><span style="font-family:Arial; color:black">U.S.</span><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">, partly whilst waiting for permission to
start her shoot in a first-offender prison in Shimane. The physical environment
itself is visually toned down with shadowless soft lighting, soft mid-tone
colours with reduced contrasts in both decor and prisoner uniform. Prisoners’
seating and movements were all highly defined. Added to that, the faces of all
prisoners are blurred. This restriction seems valid, as they are in no position
to give free consent. So, visually, it affords one of the least stimulating two
hours you are likely to find on film. But, in fact, the restriction helped both
camera-operators to emphasize awkward body reaction to the therapy sessions
which were the subject of the film. It demonstrated clearly that offenders were
more than capable of giving and receiving therapy, and by no means gave
perpetrators an easy time, when they acted as victims. Sakagami organized her
material<span> </span>around a half-dozen subjects,
punctuated with animations of<span> </span>a
childhood reminiscence of each subject. The ‘TC’ unit handled just 40 of </span><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">Japan</span><span style="font-family:Arial;color:black">’s 40,000 prison population but it showed
what could and should be done to drastically reduce the recidivism rate.</span></p>
<p class="ydp739ff797MsoNormal" style="margin-top:6.0pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none">Very different, and visually much richer was another long-term
observational documentary, <i>Book, Paper Scissors</i>, <span style="font-family:SimSun;mso-ascii-font-family:"MS Mincho";mso-hansi-font-family:"MS Mincho"" lang="ZH-CN">つつんで、ひらいて</span>. HIROSE Nanako, in her debut feature documentary,
had followed KIKUCHI Nobuyoshi, who has designed over 15,000 books or at least
their covers. It both conveys one man’s art, and a still-vibrant culture in Japan
of making printed books which are meant to be held, admired and bought in
bookshops. There are over-the-shoulder shots of him at work; reflections on
that, with Hirose sometimes heard; and very revealing interviews with Kikuchi’s
ex-apprentices. Kikuchi still works alone, apart from his long-term assistant
who digitizes all his hand-crafted designs. I intend to write more on this
film.</p>
<p class="ydp739ff797MsoNormal" style="margin-top:6.0pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none">With no way of sensing the numbers participating, I can only judge an
online festival by the films I saw. I had much rewarding viewing but <i><span> </span></i>still long to get back to Frankfurt next
year and get to grips with what we see at Q&A’s, discussions and bar-side
chats.</p>
<p class="ydp739ff797MsoNormal" style="margin-top:6.0pt;layout-grid-mode:char;mso-layout-grid-align:none">Roger<span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial"></span></p>
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