Watching Kazuhiro Soda’s films is not an easy task, since the New York based Japanese director has his own set of cinematic “commandments”, which he implements to the letter. Namely,
1 No research.
2 No meetings with subjects.
3 No scripts.
4 Roll the camera yourself.
5 Shoot for as long as possible.
6 Cover small areas deeply.
7 Do not set up a theme or goal before editing.
8 No narration, super-imposed titles, or music.
9 Use long takes.
10 Pay for the production yourself.
These rules result in highly unusual spectacle, even in the field of observational documentaries.
“Inland Sea” is streaming on Mubi
In this case, Soda takes a 122-minute look at Ushimado, a fishing village in the Inland Sea, which seems to walk steadily towards extinction. His main focus are three individuals, fisherman Wan-chai, Mrs Kosa, the owner of the shop where Wan-chai sells his fish and lastly Kumiko, the local gossip and the source...
1 No research.
2 No meetings with subjects.
3 No scripts.
4 Roll the camera yourself.
5 Shoot for as long as possible.
6 Cover small areas deeply.
7 Do not set up a theme or goal before editing.
8 No narration, super-imposed titles, or music.
9 Use long takes.
10 Pay for the production yourself.
These rules result in highly unusual spectacle, even in the field of observational documentaries.
“Inland Sea” is streaming on Mubi
In this case, Soda takes a 122-minute look at Ushimado, a fishing village in the Inland Sea, which seems to walk steadily towards extinction. His main focus are three individuals, fisherman Wan-chai, Mrs Kosa, the owner of the shop where Wan-chai sells his fish and lastly Kumiko, the local gossip and the source...
- 3/26/2019
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
Mubi's retrospective Kazuhiro Soda: Radical Observation runs March 4 – April 17, 2019. A retrospective of the filmmaker is also showing March 3 – March 27, 2019 at Spectacle in Brooklyn.In the crowded field of auteur-driven nonfiction cinema, the New York-based Japanese filmmaker Kazuhiro Soda has distinguished himself as one of its most vital and consistently rewarding talents. Regularly selected for international film festivals and awards since premiering his breakout debut Campaign in 2007, Soda’s deeply personal and probing observational documentaries offer intimate revelations across a wide swath of subjects, including: political elections; public health work; artistic practice; fading rural Japanese communities and industries; and, most recently, Americanness (The Big House). Co-produced by his wife Kiyoko Kashiwagi through their independent production company Laboratory X, these consecutively numbered “Observational Films” are guided by Soda’s immense curiosity and empathetic imagination as well as his “10 Commandments of Observational Filmmaking”—a Dogme 95-like set of rules that distills the...
- 3/12/2019
- MUBI
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