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New Docs Japan
  • The Ants
  • Campaign
  • Ghada: Songs of Palestine
  • People Crossing the River
  • A Permanent Part-timer in Distress
  • The Women the War Left Behind
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    Campaign

    (“Senkyo”)
    - JAPAN / 2007 / Japanese / Color / Video / 120 min / Subtitled in English min

    Director, Photography, Editing: Soda Kazuhiro
    Production Company: Laboratory X
    With the cooperation of IFP
    Source: Astaire
    World Sales: Laboratory X

    Yamauchi Kazuhiko finds himself running in a by-election for a seat on the Kawasaki City Council. The leading conservative party choosing a novice with no political experience as a parachute candidate? In any case, needing to win the election, the LDP fully mobilizes its organizational resources. It runs a fierce gutter campaign, and sends in Prime Minister Koizumi and other political heavyweights to show their support. After a spectacular premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the film is to be broadcast on thirty-eight networks to TV viewers worldwide.


    [Director’s Statement] Campaign might be about politics but it is not a political film. By observing an LDP election campaign, I wanted individual audience members to feel and interpret in their own way a complex reality that can be glimpsed but never fully explained in words. The film is neither black nor white but gray, and I’m hoping that after watching the film the audience will take away with them the feeling that something is not fully resolved.


    - Soda Kazuhiro

    Born in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, Soda has been living in New York since 1993. Freezing Sunlight (1996), his short fiction film The Flicker (1997), and other works have been well received at film festivals worldwide. He has produced over forty NHK documentaries. Landscape Without Mother, which deals with adoption issues, won the 2001 Telly Award. Campaign is his first feature documentary.