Danchizake (Homemade Sake)
JAPAN / 2001 / Japanese / Color / Video / 49 min
Director, Script, Photography, Narrator, Producer: Ono Satoshi
Editing: Shimada Takeshi
Source: Ono Satoshi
5-5-12-503 Yokodai, Isogo-ku, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa, 235-0045 JAPAN
Phone: 81-45-832-9007 Fax: 81-45-711-1344
The director lives with his father in a public housing complex. The director’s father, a painter, brews sake in plastic bottles. The camera follows each step in the monotonous process, from measuring, washing and cooking the rice, to adding malt and sake lees before leaving the mixture to ferment. The director then interviews his mother, who has left the family home to live by herself in an apartment. She speaks candidly about everything from how she met her husband to the family finances. We see the invisible ties within this fragmented family, interspliced with glimpses of a taciturn father who paints in a room of the building. Danchizake (Homemade Sake) is twenty-four-yearold Ono Satoshi’s graduation piece for the Image Forum Institute of the Moving Image.
[Director’s Statement] Ever since I was young, I have felt a certain incompatability and dissatisfaction with the form of my family: my mother works, while my father does not work but paints. To make this film, however, I listened to my mother’s story, in which both my father and mother were born before my birth, met each other, married, raised three children and have lived ever since. Simple as it were, her story made me face these facts. Through this work, I think that the feelings of not belonging and of dissatisfaction towards my parents that I had before making this film have undergone a change. I would not call it wonderful that my father paints while my mother works, but it is the natural shape of my family. I felt strongly that I was born from these parents. My father’s home-brewed sake takes two weeks of fermentation to complete, but my family is still in the process of fermenting. I recorded the Ono family in the midst of its fermentation.
Ono Satoshi
Born in Yokohama in 1977. After graduating from Rissho University, where he studied psychology, studied filmmaking at the Image Forum Institute of the Moving Image. Danchizake (Homemade Sake) is his graduation piece, and received an award at the screening of the 2001 graduation works. Currently a student in the specialized study course at Image Forum. |