Waking Up the Village
1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoThe Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, a biennial project started in 1989 as a means of mura okoshi (waking up the village) to revitalize the city of Yamagata, has evolved into a first-rate international film festival. In the four years since its inception, the biennial has expanded and now screens well over 400 films. Each year the festival organizers select films from around the world, with a particular emphasis on cinema. This year there were four programs: the Competition; Currents; Spectres - Transfigurations in Electronic Shadows, a tribute to the 100th anniversary of film; and Japanese Documentaries of the 1970s. Concurrent screenings occurred daily from 10am-11pm. One of the deciding factors to host a film festival in Yamagata was the relative high concentration of movie theaters, six of which are within a few minutes walking distance from each other. For film fanatics, many of whom also attended the Tokyo International Film Festival in September, it was a veritable feast and a rare opportunity to view films not often screened in Japan. Additionally, the small-town atmosphere of Yamagata, slower paced than the impersonal hustle and bustle of Tokyo, made it easier to mingle with filmmakers and other visitors. Although male filmmakers dominated the festival, women swept most of the major competition prizes in both the Main Competition and New Currents. In the former program, Tsipi Reibenbach's Choice and Destiny (1993), a contemplative examination of her parents' Holocaust experience through their stories and contemporary daily actions, took the Grand Prize (also known as the Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize). Heddy Honigmann's Metal and Melancholy (1993), a series of sometimes humorous and other times painful backseat conversations with Peruvian cabdrivers, captured the Mayor's Prize. Judges favored the down-to-earth, candid approach that both films exhibited over 13 other films that included the popular, theatrically-released American documentaries Hoop Dreams (1993, by Steve James) and Crumb (1994, by Terry Zwigoff). Other lauded films included Barbara and Winfried Junge's Screenplay: The Times (1993), an ongoing epic, a la Michael Apted's 7 Up series, that follows the development of a group of East German schoolchildren and the technology that recorded them over the years, and Peter Mettler's Picture of Light (1994) that captures on film the elusive Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights. Both films received runner-up prizes. Anand Patwardhan, who connects machismo to religious fundamentalism as a possible motive for the continuing violence between Muslim and Hindi groups in India, received a Special Prize for Father, Son and Holy War (1994). Probably the heart of the festival and what makes it unique among documentary festivals is the New Currents program organized by Ogawa Shinsuke for the first festival in 1989. Shinsuke, who helped initiate the festival itself, dedicated much of his life to encouraging fellow filmmakers. Although he died in 1992, his legacy lives on in this program. This year's programming in New Currents was eclectic: films from 18 countries ranged from full-length features to 10-minute shorts, from Hi-8 video to 16mm film, from informal, gritty, journal entry videos (Sokly Ny and Spencer Nakasako's a.k.a. Don Bonus [1995]), to highly constructed documentary-fiction hybrids (Chen Yiwen's Scenes of Violence [1994]). For those in search of a quintessential expression of Asian Cinema, however, it was certainly not represented in the program - if anything, the program only reinforced the notion that sensibilities are as diverse as the cultures and languages the region encompasses. Still, a number of common themes such as cross-culturalism, 'modernization, violence, self-determination and family and displacement could be found among the films, and this despite the various ways such ideas were conveyed. …
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