Other Screenings
Special Invitation Films
[Venues] YC Yamagata Central Public Hall 6F, CL CS Yamagata Citizens’ Hall (Large Hall, Small Hall)
Lima-born director Heddy Honigmann, four of whose films have been screened at YIDFF since Metal and Melancholy (YIDFF ’95), passed away in 2022. In memory of her passing, YIDFF 2023 will screen Crazy (YIDFF 2001), a film in which interviews with Dutch UN soldiers shed light on emotional scars and highlight the powers of music. Pedro Costa’s short film The Daughters of Fire (2023) follows three sisters who are separated by a volcano eruption in Cape Verde. The closing screening will be The List (2023), in which the Makhmalbafs, a filmmaking family, do everything they can to help artists and filmmakers under the threat of execution leave Afghanistan in 2021, when the Taliban returned to power overnight.
- Opening Film
Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus - JAPAN / 2023 / 103 min
Director: Sora Neo
Musician and artist Sakamoto Ryuichi passed away in March 2023. Though battling illness, he mustered his remaining strength to perform and record a solo concert at NHK’s 509 Studio in September 2022—featuring just him and a grand piano. He selected twenty works to play, that trace his border-defying trajectory, including “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” a piece from his last album 12, and “Tong Poo,” which he played as a solo piano piece for the first time. The film captures his fingers on the keyboard, his breath, and his hands etched with the life he lived. The director and film crew, in whom Sakamoto placed his complete trust, meticulously planned the shots and created a rigorous and intimate cinematic space that feels like a one-of-a-kind treasure.
- Crazy
- THE NETHERLANDS / 1999 / 97 min
Director: Heddy Honigmann
Dutch UN soldiers revisit the battlefields burnt into their memory. Now that they have returned to everyday life, the men find that recalling their experiences in faraway places inevitably brings one particular song to mind. Director Honigmann experiments with a tenacious interview style to expose the scars the soldiers bear deep inside when the music intertwines with memories of wartime.
- The Daughters of Fire
- PORTUGAL / 2023 / 8 min
Director: Pedro Costa
Three young sisters are separated by the volcanic eruption of Fogo in Cape Verde. But they sing: one day, we will know why we live and why we suffer.
- The Power of Speech
- FRANCE / 1988 / 25 min
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
A man and a woman speak on the phone about infidelity and murder in dialogue quoted from James M. Cain’s hard-boiled novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Another man and woman converse in the lines of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Power of Words”—famous for having been translated into French by Baudelaire: “ . . . did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words?” This work, an exploration of the possibilities of video media that makes a collage of a variety of art including Bob Dylan, J.S. Bach, and Picasso, is one of the video works to which Godard had dedicated himself since the 1970s. It saw its unveiling in the same period as Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Chapter 1A: Toutes les histoires.
The programming of this work for this screening was realized at the suggestion of director Pedro Costa.+Talk: Chris Fujiwara
- Closing Film
The List - UK / 2023 / 65 min
Director: Hana Makhmalbaf
In 2021, within a few days of the withdrawal of international troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban returns to power. Filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his family rush to work by phone and computer from their London home to help in exiting the country the many artists and filmmakers who have been suddenly exposed to the threat of execution. Attached to the wall is a list of cultural figures in need of safe passage. The family attempts to guide these individuals to transport planes, but many others have also gathered at Kabul airport in hopes of fleeing, and the process is far from straightforward. Scenes in Kabul and London intersect as they do everything in their power, working against the clock and under pressure.