Heta Village
Heta Village (1973)
146 minutes, B&W, 16mm, English Subtitles
After years of following the Narita struggle, Ogawa turned his camera from the action towards the way of life of the farmers and what they were trying to defend. Arguably his masterpiece, Heta Village is less a document than an attempt to embody different modes of time and space. The third film in a series of four.
Another Village: The Radical Documentaries of Ogawa Shinsuke
Ogawa Shinsuke was one of the pillars of postwar Japanese documentary, whose influence has spread throughout Asia. Pursuing committed, independent documentary, he soon realized that it wasn’t enough to stand on the side of the oppressed: one had to live with them, and experience their different sense of time and space. Ogawa’s films did not just document some of the great struggles in modern Japan, they also recorded alternative modes of living that were disappearing with capitalist development. This series presents four masterworks representative of different stages in Ogawa’s career.