Yamagata and Film
A Movie Capital 2025 Project
Taiwanese & Japanese Home Movies: Small Film, Vast Universe
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TV Documentaries Produced by Local Yamagata TV Stations
Kids Film Workshop Screening
Repository of Memories: The Former Yoshiike Clinic
Madame soie Cévennes
The Texture of Myriad Overlapping Memories
This year marks the tenth installment of this program, which was launched in 2007 to feature films by directors with ties to Yamagata Prefecture and and has engaged in activities such as discovering archival films.
A Movie Capital 2025 Project started with the discovery three years ago of more than 13 hours of 16mm master negative footage shot for A Movie Capital (1991), which documented the first YIDFF. The footage captured in both images and sound the strong will power that can be said to have formed the origins of this festival. In advance of next year, when Ogawa Shinsuke would have turned ninety, we will hold the first public screening of unearthed footage that shows Ogawa himself talking about the festival.
Much of what is featured in the Taiwanese & Japanese Home Movies program consists of family footage, the backdrops to these home movies also contain documentary traces of the cityscapes and ways of life of their times. What at first seem like purely personal home movies come vibrantly to life.
TV Documentaries Produced by Local Yamagata TV Stations features documentaries produced by four local broadcasters, that were popular at YIDFF’s regular Friday screening series.
And then there is Madame soie Cévennes, a film that producer Takahashi Takuya started but which was left unfinished when he passed away. Three years after a production committee inherited the project, it has at last been completed. We will hold the world premiere of this documentary about silk, which moves between Yamagata, Kyoto, and France.
This year’s program of conversations and screenings related to Yamagata and Film will take place each day in the Former Yoshiike Clinic, a celebrated 113-year-old structure for which preservation efforts have finally begun to take shape. Just relaxing in this old Western-style building, where time moves more slowly, should itself be enjoyable.