The director s main message

This film follows the story of an ex-comfort woman who has been fighting against the Indonesian government and the Japanese government. Episodes of other ex-comfort women are also included. After viewing this film, I would like you to imagine what you d do if you were in their position. I would be happy if you could feel their feelings. And I hope that these issues (and the other social problems) will be carefully considered. Another issue I tried to emphasize through this film is what occurred in Indonesia during World War II. Indonesian comfort women issues are not well known. So I hope this film will shed light on the subject.

Difficult points during the research

On the first day, Mardiyem told me her horrible experiences during her days as a comfort woman because she had a strong desire to share her story. She insisted that her experience was true and she had a responsibility to tell people to avoid similar incidents happaning again. It was not very difficult to hear the truth in Mardiyem s testimony. I interviewed some ex-comfort women who had never spoken of their experiences as comfort women before. However there were some ex-comfort woman who cried when questioned and wouldn t remember the experience at the comfort stations. But even if the experience is too harsh to remember, it should be recalled. To tell the truth is my responsibility as a documentarist. I told them, the film is a opportunity to spread their reality.

The reasons for focusing on Mardiyem

In Indonesia, a movement by comfort women started in 1993. One of the main organizers was Mardiyem. She has protested against the Indonesian government and the Japanese government. I found her attitude so interesting that I asked her if I could film her. What impressed me was her belief that she could survive the comfort station and later protest against those who oppresed her there. It may have been more tough to stay quiet about it for 50 years.

What I elt from filming the ex-comfort women

I held interviews, almost crying. I strongly found that war should be obliterated. War leaves harshness in people s minds. I feel like Japanese society now, with the recent terrorism in the United States, is so much like the Japan of those times, when we seemed to just slide into war for no reason. Are we going to repeat the same mistakes again? Most of the Indonesian comfort women became unable to express love and didn t have families. They didn t receive any support from the Indonesian government. We shouldn t forget our responsibility to those abused during war. School textbooks should include those facts and teach children what we have done. And I hope that we ll never see such occurences in the future.

Daily Bulletin (DB): How would you define non-commercial film?

Sueoka Ichiro (SI): Independently produced works made on an individual basis. They should be made not for profit, but for the filmmaker’s self-expression—what you might call pure art. They’re works that are not commercial films with a distribution network.

DB: Why did you start the FMIC?

SI: If a filmmaker doesn’t care to have subsequent screenings after a film premieres, that often marks the end of its life already. Films are supposed to leave the maker’s hands and become the property of society or the world once they’ve been screened, but in actual fact, the filmmaker ends up handling the film and it never makes it out into that greater realm. Information itself is kept in the dark, and we don’t even know who made what or when it was made. I started thinking that the problem lies in distribution. If we only created a distribution network, we might be able to engage with films that we’d already seen once again. FMIC was born from this logic.

DB: Could you tell us about your actual activities?

SI: We’d like to make it possible to see, make, participate in and criticize things on the Internet. Our first step is to make a database, to gather information that we receive into a database and release it publicly on the Internet. I’d like to use the interactive nature of the Internet and make it easy to communicate with filmmakers. Then there’s criticism. We’re thinking to develop critical activities via a mail magazine on the Internet, for starters. Also, I often get asked for advice about the technical side of filmmaking, so I’d like to provide support in that area as well. And I’d like to make a space for the exchange of information with groups who are already active, and to create a window for introducing works from Japan to groups from overseas, and vice versa.

DB: There’s going to be a roundtable discussion later this week. What will you be talking about ?

SI: Filmmakers in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe all share the difficulty of getting independently-produced films released. I think that getting together to talk about this will confirm the importance of making archives.
DB: And what about the experimental film program?

Nishimura Tomohiro: For these two screenings, we decided to show experimental films as one easily recognizable area of non-commercial film. There are many different ways to screen experimental films, so I wanted to talk about curation. Screening films isn’t just about showing one film after another; it’s crucial to give the audience a kind of literacy for watching the films. The issue of curation is also going to be important when the FMIC starts to collect and diffuse large amounts of information. The kind of things that are blindingly obvious in the visual arts aren’t valued in the film world, but if all sorts of people curate programs and suggest new ways of looking at film, we should be able to energize and rewrite film history.

After this general introduction to the FMIC, the interview derailed into conversation about the different films that will be screened during YIDFF ’01, the relation between film and music, found footage and copyrights. We couldn’t publish it for space limitations, but recommend that anyone interested in hearing more hightail it to the Yamagata Citizens’ Hall Small Hall.