neo-Asian Documentary - Yamagata review (longish)

[GavinRees@aol.com]

Thanks are due to Aaron  for giving an update on how some of the 
documentaries from Yamagata are being distributed further afield. And 
apologies are due from me. I wrote an article about the festival in 
December's edition of Sight and Sound, and have been too lazy to post a copy 
on the list. Double apologies if Asako is reading this. A copy will be 
catapaulted to you digitally before the week is out. 

I originally wrote a paragraph about the Full Shot group, but that was cut. 
However I have written more about them in an Australian film magazine, and 
that article should be coming out any day now. If people like, I will post it 
when it does. The name of the Ogawa film should actually read "Film Making 
and the Way to the Village". What is contained below is a misprint.

Anyway here  is the Sight and Sound thing more or less as they printed it:

Yamagata, In the mountains of Northern Japan lies, is famous for its soba 
noodles and alpine walks. Every two years it is also  setting for Asia?s most 
important documentary film-festival. And plenty of people it seems are making 
the kinds of serious and difficult documentaries the schedulers of Uk 
television scarcely bother with any more. 
This years grand prize for instance was won by the German Kral's Images of 
the Absence in which the director returns home to Buenos Aires, finds out why 
his parents divorced and ruminates on the city of his birth. Family rupture 
is also at the heart of , Divorce Iranian Style, Kim Longinotto, and Ziba 
Mir-Hosseini?s acute fly-on-the-wall look at an Iranian Divorce Court, which 
won the Fipresci prize. 
Though shot on DV,  a selection of intensely personal films made by young 
Taiwanese filmmakers also turned heads. With the growth of Mainland China's 
power they felt as if they were made with the energy of those living on 
borrowed time. In Wu Yao-tung?s Swimming on the Highway a young man dying of 
Aids, hopes that a film of his life-story will have a dignity which he feels 
the real version lacked. The more he acts, the more he questions whether he 
can find anything stable to believe in. I love (O80), (Yang Li-zhou) centers 
around a young artist?s struggle to survive being crushed by two years of 
forced conscription in the Taiwanese Army.  (The number in the title refers 
to the freephone line, conscripts use to inform on corrupt officers, and to 
chat up phone-girls).  
A retrospective of Joris Ivens, whose beautiful and engaging pro-communist 
documentaries provided a strange historical contrast with the contemporary 
work. On the Way to the Village a film showing Ogawa Shinsuke and his 
collective working on the famous Narita: Heta Village (1973) had its first 
screening, (Ogawa suppressed it).  Here you can see how the charismatic 
documentarist developed the aesthetic sensibility of the group he worked and 
lived with, by debating and cajoling them late into the night after filming . 
Although there was a fair amount of breast beating among the older Japanese 
hands, along the lines of: they don?t make them like Ogawa anymore, there  is 
still fascinating work squeezed out at the more anarchic fringes of Japanese 
film.  "A - The International Edition": (Mori Tatsuya),  shot inside the 
headquarters of the cult that released nerve gas in the Tokyo Subway, sees 
the media siege through the eyes of a hopelessly unprepared press spokesman. 
The show stopper, though, was The New God  (Tsuchiya Yutaka), in which a left 
wing filmmaker notorious for attacking the Emperor meets an ultra-nationalist 
punk band. They talk, get confused, and send the female lead singer with a 
former Red Army terrorist to North Korea on a fact-finding mission . 
Much of the best work here shows the camera as a  way of achieving articulacy 
in fast changing societies which have not traditionally valued individuality. 
Cinema verite of this kind shakes understanding out of a film's makers as 
much as the people being filmed. 
_______________________

Gavin Rees