Magino Story: Raising Silkworms
Magino Story: Raising Silkworms (1977)
112 minutes, Color, 16mm, English Subtitles
After realizing that he still could not understand the farmers, Ogawa and his staff moved to Magino in Yamagata to begin farming themselves. From this experience emerged a series of films, beginning with Raising Silkworms, that interweave local folktales with meticulous records of farm activities, to evoke rural life from within.
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.