Minamata Diary
2004/103min/video/color/
Camera/Editor: Tsuchimoto Noriaki
Assistant: Tsuchimoto Motoko
Sound: Kubota Yukio
Screen
03/23 19 :30 2 hall
03/26 9:00 1 hall
In 1995, Mr. and Mrs. Tsuchimoto moved their residence to Minamata once again. Their work was to photograph over 1000 altar portraits of deceased Minamata victims from the past 40 years, to exhibit at the 1996 Minamata Exhibition in Tokyo. Not intending to “make a film”, the video footage shot in their free time recorded the beauty of the changing faces of the four seasons, the community festivals, joyful people, and their prayers. The filmmakers listened to the voices of the sea, the fish, and the people recovering from the past, and filmed their impressions and emotions of that year in Minamata. A decade later, a live recording of a 1996 voice-over explanation by Tsuchimoto himself was added onto the sound track and the work was completed.
TSUCHIMOTO Noriaki
Born in 1928 in Gifu Prefecture and moved to Tokyo in his third year of grade school. In 1946, he entered Waseda University and joined the Communist Party. In 1952, aiming bring about armed revolt, he went as a member of Mountain Village Underground Activists to Mt. Ogawa but got arrested. He joined the Japan/China Friendship Society in 1954. Through the introduction of his neighbor, Yoshino Seiji, a member of the board at Iwanami Productions, he entered the company in 1956, but turned freelance in 1957 and worked mainly on Hani Susumu’s films. In 1961, he helped establish the “Ao no Kai” with members of the production and technical staff. Initially producing television documentaries, his maiden effort as a director was An Engineer’s Assistant (“Aru kikan joshi”, 1962). After that he did Document: On the Road (“Dokyumento rojo”, 1963) and Chua Swee Lin, Exchange Student (“Ryugakusei Chua Sui Riwn”, 1965), opening up his own documentary world. His Pre-Partisan (“Paruchizan zenshi”, 1969) for Ogawa Productions faced the end of the student movement, and with Minamata: The Victims and Their World (“Minamata: Kanjasan to sono sekai”, 1971), he made the first in a long series of films dealing with Minamata. Works like his Afghan Spring (“Yomigaeru karezu”, 1989 screened at YIDFF '89) continued to make statements on behalf of the weak. For an exhibition called the “Minamata-Tokyo Exhibition”, he spent a year in Minamata collecting the photographs of deceased victims, which record was compiled in his most recent video, Minamata Diary -- Visiting Resurrected Souls (2004). He has also self-produced videos Traces -- The Kabul Museum 1988 (2003), a precious record of the Afghanistan museum that was later destroyed in the war. Another Afghanistan -- Kabul Diary 1985 (2003) also is recompiled from his footage from 1985. His recent publications include Nevertheless, Okhotsk Sea of Fate (Kage Shobo).
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