JAPANESE FILM FESTIVAL: This documentary, made up of new interviews and archival material, is an earnest and heartfelt exploration of the challenges – economic, logistical and emotional – facing the population of a small town that was wiped out by an earthquake in 2004.
Seen here in photos and stock footage, the village, Yamakosi of Japan’s Niigata Prefecture, was once the kind of place that might have at one time graced a postcard or tourist brochure; set in highly remote and hard to reach mountainous territory, complete with river and farming terraces, it looks pretty and peaceful.
But its specific geographic features proved lethal: the mountain slipped into the valley wiping out homes and farms and damning the river, which shortly after the earthquake flooded into the wrecked area creating further havoc and heartbreak.
Early on in the film we meet survivors and hear their stories of survival. Occasionally these yarns take on a strange, unexpected turn. There’s one tale about a father and son, farmers, whose home and property were wiped out. But what haunts their collective memory of the moment the earthquake came was the sight and sound of dying cattle trapped in the collapsed barns, their heads and horns poking out of the wreckage, but unable to break free.
Still, for every surprising and moving beat here (and there’s quite a few) this isn’t an imaginative or especially creative piece of documentary moviemaking. Narrated in solemn tones by Hatsunori Hasegawa, the film’s formal style seems to be pitched somewhere between the shallow platitudes of a news magazine gloss on tragedy and the deadening obviousness of a National Geographic survey feature, where real-life events are ploddingly retold with much detail, but no sense of urgency.
Director Shinichi Hashimoto shoots the whole thing in a combination of formal interviews and observational settings and he gets some good stuff: the devastation in the features of an old woman who looks on as her unhabitual home is lost to the demolition squad; and the bewildered brave faces of city burghers, civic authorities and locals who gather to discuss the enormous task of building a recovery. But then Hashimoto resorts to bland, emotive strategies like laying in heavy string orchestral music over scenes of earthquake victims fleeing the scene.
But for all of its clunky technique, there are grace notes here that are telling and evocative. It’s a movie about resilience and, in some way, it’s a tribute to the folks of Yamakosi, who seem determined to get through their tragedy, no matter what kind of help that is possible from outsiders. And this notion of independence and perseverance is laid in by Hashimoto right at the start of the film; over shots of devastation, so awful it looks like the earth has erupted with some grisly scar, we hear actual recordings of emergency services assessing the challenge. 'You should try to handle it on your own," intones one guy, who we assume holds a role in services for tactical support for natural disasters. It’s a cruel irony and it comes off less as a cheap shot at the expense of authorities and more like a prophesy.
