[KineJapan] Nippon Connection 20

[Roger Macy]

Here’s a report from Nippon Connection 20 which concludedrecently. It is necessarily selective and other list-members are welcome to addor disagree.

As previous posts have mentioned, the festival was held entirely online,necessarily, of course, due to ongoing Covid-19 restrictions.

The first thing to say is that it worked – 70 or so films were madeavailable online via a payment system, and a range of other events werestreamed 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 acouple of the talks which allowed some interaction through a ‘chat’ board,spending what time I had available searching out the films. The Vimeo streamingwas entirely without glitches, the website information and links were accurateand the distributors can be assured that the country restrictions also worked –when I mistakenly selected ‘Nippon Visions shorts’ in stead of ‘Nippon Docsshorts., I was barred.

I have no inside information from the Festival but I can imagine theorganization would be a struggle in any circumstances, particularly negotiatingand implementing the country restrictions. I can only guess what films aremissing entirely because distributors were too difficult or uncontactable. List-memberswon’t need telling that many Japanese distributors have unrealistic ideas ofhow marketable their films are abroad but I would have thought those thatdecided to take what was on offer made the smarter move.

And so to some of the films I saw. Although I concentrated on thedocumentaries, the ones I caught elsewhere were rewarding. The mainstream, ‘Cinema’strand was the most restricted outside Germany, but I’d liked the previous filmI had seen here by ŌKU Akiko and My Sweet Grappa Remedies 甘いお酒でうがい proved to be another well-made, sensitiveentertainment film. The script, fromhis own novel, was by ŌKAWARA Jirō - the ‘Jirō’ half of the duo SISSONE – who had also adapted Ōku’sprevious film. She also used music by TAKANO Masaki, which I found intelligentand 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 buildingup a team.

In the ‘Visions’ section, the one character of the title, 燕is to be read as ‘Yan’. But the child in thestory, adamantly says to his Taiwanese mother, that his name is to be said, japanese, as ‘Tsubame’, and not the chinese ‘Yan’. In flash-back sequences, a relationshipbetween a young child and his mother breaks down under the cultural oppressionof his need not to be a nail sticking up in the Japanese school system. Themain story portrays the grown-up Tsubame/Yan making contact with his estrangedelder brother in Kaohsiung. It was thedebut directorship of the photographer IMAMURA Keisuke from a script by WASHIZU Noriko, for whom I can trace noother credits. Imamura could have let his excellent actors express without someof 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.

Also in the ‘Visions’ section, おろかもの I think means ‘the thing/things we don’t talk about’but the english rendering spits it out: ‘Me and My Brother’s Mistress’.That ‘me’ is a 17-year-old younger sister of a brother already in the businessworld. Between domestic and walking episodes, character and story are developedby 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 thoughta subversion of a classic American film, but I won’t spoil it further, althoughthe publicity still does. It was jointly made by two directors, HAGA Takashi and SUZUKI Shō with script by NUMATA Masataka,all names new to me.

Is there a film-school director in Japan who’s a special admirer of Rohmer ?  Minori, on the Brink お嬢ちゃん, is not only built aroundduologues and walking scenes, it’s opening and closing shots are on the beach.it’s star, HAGIWARA Minori convinces asa 20-year-old frustrated at her dead-end social world, but a series of minorparts are acted without a trace of cliché. I didn’t catch the previous film of NINOMIYA Ryūtarō, which got to Locarno but this is very well made and full ofsharp observation. He clearly had a tightly conceived script before he started.

It was a documentary, An Ant StrikesBack, that won the Nippon Online award. It tells a story of a drawn-outbattle 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, Iparticularly missed a Q&A which, in normal years, are a particular strengthof this strand, as NC often gets both the maker and the subject of the film tobe present. I had a couple of questions which would probably have been answeredbefore I had to ask and which would likely have cleared my queries. Thejapanese title, アリ地獄天国, ‘Ant hell &heaven’, gets a bit closer to the point, but I didn’t see the heaven. I wouldthink the company would be quite comfortable showing the film to recruits, insupport of their programme of intimidation against all resistance. The film, byTSUCHIYA Tokachi, after all, reports that not a single member of theirworkforce had joined the ‘Precariat’, or any other independent union.

Only after watching Prison Circle, did I realize that its maker, SAKAGAMIKaori, although born in Ōsaka, had made two previous documentaries on prisoner programmesin the U.S., partly whilst waiting for permission tostart her shoot in a first-offender prison in Shimane. The physical environmentitself is visually toned down with shadowless soft lighting, soft mid-tonecolours with reduced contrasts in both decor and prisoner uniform. Prisoners’seating and movements were all highly defined. Added to that, the faces of allprisoners are blurred. This restriction seems valid, as they are in no positionto give free consent. So, visually, it affords one of the least stimulating twohours you are likely to find on film. But, in fact, the restriction helped bothcamera-operators to emphasize awkward body reaction to the therapy sessionswhich were the subject of the film. It demonstrated clearly that offenders weremore than capable of giving and receiving therapy, and by no means gaveperpetrators an easy time, when they acted as victims. Sakagami organized hermaterial  around a half-dozen subjects,punctuated with animations of  achildhood reminiscence of each subject. The ‘TC’ unit handled just 40 of Japan’s 40,000 prison population but it showedwhat could and should be done to drastically reduce the recidivism rate.

Very different, and visually much richer was another long-termobservational documentary, Book, Paper Scissors, つつんで、ひらいて. HIROSE Nanako, in her debut feature documentary,had followed KIKUCHI Nobuyoshi, who has designed over 15,000 books or at leasttheir covers. It both conveys one man’s art, and a still-vibrant culture in Japanof making printed books which are meant to be held, admired and bought inbookshops. There are over-the-shoulder shots of him at work; reflections onthat, with Hirose sometimes heard; and very revealing interviews with Kikuchi’sex-apprentices. Kikuchi still works alone, apart from his long-term assistantwho digitizes all his hand-crafted designs. I intend to write more on thisfilm.

With no way of sensing the numbers participating, I can only judge anonline festival by the films I saw. I had much rewarding viewing but  still long to get back to Frankfurt nextyear and get to grips with what we see at Q&A’s, discussions and bar-sidechats.

Roger

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