Punto de Vista will show the Best Japanese documentary films of the last sixty years
Under the title The Cinema of a Thousand Years, this season unites a selection of Japanese non-fiction masterpieces in an attempt at reconstructing the country's little-known filmography by screening some of its fundamental components from 1939 to 2004. It is set to be the first retrospective of this subject at a Spanish film festival.
The season mainly focuses on films produced since the World War, but does also rescue the work of Kamei Fumio, the all-important hinge between the pre-war and the post-war periods. Taking this encounter with Fumio as a starting-point, The Cinema of a Thousand Years is set to screen samples from the main stages into which the Japanese documentary of the last 50 years can be divided. Some of the filmmakers included in the season are, for example, Susumu Hani, Toshio Matsumoto, Shohei Imamura and Tsukimoto Noriaki.
The Sixties can, in general, be said to have been a period of extraordinary wealth, a wealth which often proved uncomfortable and imperfect, a wealth of wounding and wounded films. Leading this phenomenon, the figure of Ogawa Shinsuke. Regarded by many as the greatest Japanese documentary filmmaker, Ogawa Shinsuke deserves a chapter in the history of non-fiction all to himself. Obsessed with the mystery of the small and the passing of time, he went on to develop one of the most ambitious experiments in the history of documentary film. Punto de Vista is set to present the work of this filmmaker in Spain for the first time.
Other directors included in the season are, for example, Hara Kazuo, Naomi Kawase and Sato Makoto, both members of a younger generation.
THE CINEMA OF A THOUSAND YEARS
JAPANESE DOCUMENTARY CLASSICS
When North American occupation came to an end in 1952, Japanese documentary film began to turn out a regular production of great variety and wealth, forming something akin to a new memory, a new awareness. When the war finished on the 14th of August 1945, Japan was a country in ruins, faced with the dual challenge of understanding what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and of confronting an irreversible break in its thousand years of history.
The documentary camera went on to record the dizzy changes from the point of view of morale, intimacy, social life, emotional expression and identity. Over a eleven-stage journey, The Cinema of a Thousand Years makes reference to the cinema of a country starting from nothing, but which, precisely due to the momentous nature of its historical fate, has seen itself loaded with the burden of a thousand years of memory.
PROGRAMMING
The Cinema of a Thousand Years will be screened in Civican and in Golem-Yamaguchi Cinema from february the 17th and the 21th. All the documentaries will be projected with Spanish subtitles.
The cycle is composed by 11 showings:
-1: Fighting Soldiers(1939, 66 mins, 16mm, B&N) Kobayashi Issa (1941, 27 mins, 35 mm, B&N). Both films of Fumio Kamei.
-2: Children in the Class (35 mm, B/N, 30 mins, 1928). Children who draw pictures (16 mm, B/N 28 mins, 1956). Directed by Hani Susumu.
-3: Nishijin (1961, 27 mins). The song of stones (1963, 30 mins). Directed by Toshio Matsumoto.
-4: History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Color, 105 mins, 1970). Dirigida por Shohei Imamura.
-5: Minamata, Victims and Their World (120 minutos, 1971, Color, 120 mins). Directed by Tsukimoto Noriaki.
-6: Narita: Heta Village (1973, B&N, 146 min., 16 mm). Directed by Shinsuke Ogawa.
-7: The Sundial Carved by a Thousand Years of Notches: The Magino Village Story(1987, Color, 222 mins, 16 mm). Directed by Shinsuke Ogawa.
-8: The Naked Emperor Army Marches On (1987, Color, 16 mm, 122 mins).
Directes by Hara Kazuo.
-9: Life in Agano´s River. (Color, 16 mm, 1992. Directed by Sato Makoto.
-10: Agano memories (2004, Color, 16mm, 55 mins). Directed by Sato Makoto.
-11: Embracing (1992 , Color, 40 mins). In the world´s silence. (2001, Color 55 mins). Directed by Naomi Kawase.
Chatelin Bruno 
