japanese
Special Invitation Films
  • Seasonal Work in Tokyo
  • Man with No Name
  • The Oppressed Students
  • Regarding the Lives of Others
  • Far from Afghanistan: The October Edition
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    YIDFF 2011 Closing Film
    Regarding the Lives of Others

    (Manazashi no tabi Tsuchimoto Noriaki to Otsu Koshiro)
    - JAPAN / 2010 / Japanese / Color / Video / 90 min

    Director, Editor: Daishima Haruhiko
    Staff: Advanced Documentary Class of 2008, The Film School of Tokyo
    Camera Advisor, Title Calligraphy: Otsu Koshiro
    Planning, Production Company: The Film School of Tokyo

    - [Director’s Statement] With W. Eugene Smith’s photograph Tomoko and Mother in the Bath, Uemura Tomoko became a symbol of Minamata disease. She is a congenital patient who became afflicted in her mother’s womb. On the “outside,” only her tragedy is apparent. About Eugene Smith’s attempt to depict the form of her affliction, Tsuchimoto Noriaki comments: “The sight of her in spasms might seem like the perfect image of a patient, but actually she’s simply refusing the camera.” Cameraman Otsu Koshiro says, “My challenge was to express the ‘inside’ of little Tomoko as a human being.” In the film Minamata: The Patients and Their World (1971), Tomoko lies among her family members, smiling. The form of hope that this image conveys is exactly the product of the two stoic filmmakers’ “journey of the gaze” (the original Japanese title of this film).


    - Daishima Haruhiko

    Born in 1958. After working for Hakuhodo, he established Sukoburu Kobo in 1988. Produced Pineapple Tours (1992) and other films and TV programs. For YIDFF 1993, he co-coordinated the First Nations Moving Images program. Ran the cinema Box Higashinakano from 1994 to 2003. His work as director includes the Galaxy Prize-winning View on War—The World of (Filmmaker) Kuroki Kazuo (2006), broadcast on NHK.