News and Opinion

Fireside Chat about the YIDFF, Japanese Documentary, and Hanzo

The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival was held online last fall due to the continuing pandemic. That was unfortunate, but as I had previously written about film during the COVID era (here), the pandemic had also opened up opportunities to watch Japanese film and other entertainment media remotely. The YIDFF has now jumped on the bandwagon and is running an online series of some of the best Japanese documentaries in the 30+ years since the festival began in 1989. The platform is DAFilms, which also managed the Flash Forward series, and it is offering the first week free (afterwards, I think you have to be a subscriber). Check it out here.

To go along with the series, the folks at the YIDFF have asked some involved in the festival to look back on those thirty years. Markus Nornes has written a series of illuminating pieces on the YIDFF Facebook page. The film directors Oda Kaori and Dwi Sujanti Nugraheni also recorded a conversation about the trials and tribulations of making indie docs in Asia, which is now available on the YIDFF YouTube channel (here). 

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