Works from Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival- Selections from the Festival’s archives
*All YIDFF films are in English or with English subtitles.
Picture of Light by Peter Mettler
Peter Mettler / Canada, Switzerland / 1994 / English / Colour / 35mm / 83min
Picture of Light is an hallucinatory documentary tale which documents a filmmaker’s journey to Canada’s arctic in search of the Northern Lights. While combining glimpses of the characters who live in this remote environment and the crew’s both comic and absurd attempts to deal with extremes, the film reflects upon the paradoxes involved in trying to capture the natural wonder of the Northern Lights on celluloid.
The Underground Orchestra by Heddy Honigmann
Heddy Honigmann / Holland / 1997 / French, Rumanian, Spanish / 35mm / 108min
In the tunnels of the Paris Metro and on streetcorners, a variety of musicians play their instruments in order to feed themselves. This is a familiar scene in any city, but behind the music is the reality that many of these people are political exiles and illegal immigrants. Heddy Honigman, who in Metal and Melancholy (1993), exhibited at YIDFF ’95, turned her camera on taxi drivers in Lima, Peru and captured people living hard lives in Latin America, here imprints freshly into the screen the musical performances, lives and words of these survivors in a foreign land. The splendor of the music touches all genres, from classical and chanson to R&B and world music, while the musicians tell of their hard pasts and far-from-easy present lives. Honigman’s penetrating eye overflows with warm sympathy, but the images maintain a light style and do not slip easily into sentiment. A paean to humanity for the eyes and ears, this is the director’s finest work.
Shepherds’ Journey into the Third Millennium by Erich Langjahr
Erich Langjahr / Switzerland / 2002 / Swiss-German, German / 35mm / 124min
A look of daily lives of a family of shepherds in Switzerland set against a mountainous backdrop. A flock of several hundred sheep wanders through snow in search of fresh pastures, crossing roads and negotiating traffic. Lambs are born under the gaze of the shepherd’s wife and children, who spend day after day milking by hand and making bread. Shepherding is said to be one of the oldest professions in the world, and we are shown its harsh and hard-working lifestyle with a steady gaze.
The 3 Rooms of Melancholia by Pirjo Honkasalo
Pirjo Honkasalo / Finland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden / 2004 / Russian, Chechen, Arabic, Finnish / 35mm / 106min
The film follows the lives of children affected by the war in Chechnya in three different settings. Young children at a St. Peterburg military academy in northwestern Russia do nothing but rain continously, while in the devastated Groznyi, catiral of the Chechen Republic, the lives of parents and children have been torn asunder. The last setting takes a look at life in refugee camp in neighboring Ingush where the children are frightened by the sounds of aerial bombs. In this touching look at the Chechen War, what surfaces are the expressions of children who live under tragic, futureless circumstances.
Encounters by Pierre-Marie Goulet
Perre-Marie Goulet / Portugal, France / 2006 / Portuguese / Video / 105 min
Mesmerized by the songs of Peroguarda villagers in southern Portugal’s Alentejo rejoin, young Portuguese modern poet Antonio Reis, Corsican researcher of Portuguese folk music Michel Giacometti, and film director Paulo Rocha visited the village one after another in the late 1950s. This work refreshes the soul and flows with songs and poetry seeped in sadness, as well as the atmosphere of the quiet sea and village, fields adorned with vibrant red flowers, and road traveled by Reis and the others, while interspersing images from Paulo Rocha’s Film.
＊The explanations of the films of Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival were taken from its website