Yamagata On CathayPlay
Yamagata, a small city in Japan, 300 kilometers north of Tokyo in the Yamagata Prefecture, was the first place in Asia to host an international documentary film festival.
The first Yamagata International Documentary Festival was held in October 1989 to celebrate the centennial of Yamagata City, and since then the festival has been held once every two years, and after more than 20 years of continuous exhibition and promotion of documentaries, it has now become one of the most important documentary film festivals in the world.
Since the first Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Chinese language documentaries have never missed any edition, and a large number of outstanding documentary works from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have been presented in Japan, producing an continuous exchange at the level of both creativity and exhibition.
Many of the authors of The New Chinese Documentary Movement in the 1990s began their international exchange through Yamagata. Wu Wenguang once confessed, "During the ‘documentary starvation era’ in the early 1990s (when there were virtually no domestic documentary resources), Yamagata was my 'documentary nourishment bank'." In Yamagata, Chinese documentary filmmakers such as Wu came into contact with internationally acclaimed documentary filmmakers (Shinsuke Ogawa, Frederick Wiseman and etc.), whose documentary methods they introduced to the country, making Direct Cinema the dominant aesthetic of Chinese independent documentaries for the last three decades. It is no exaggeration to say that Yamagata in the 1990s shaped the landscape of Chinese independent documentary.
With this in mind, CathayPlay has decided to screen over a dozen Chinese films that have been exhibited at Yamagata over the past thirty years as a way to review its historical influence.
The first Yamagata International Documentary Festival was held in October 1989 to celebrate the centennial of Yamagata City, and since then the festival has been held once every two years, and after more than 20 years of continuous exhibition and promotion of documentaries, it has now become one of the most important documentary film festivals in the world.
Since the first Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Chinese language documentaries have never missed any edition, and a large number of outstanding documentary works from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have been presented in Japan, producing an continuous exchange at the level of both creativity and exhibition.
Many of the authors of The New Chinese Documentary Movement in the 1990s began their international exchange through Yamagata. Wu Wenguang once confessed, "During the ‘documentary starvation era’ in the early 1990s (when there were virtually no domestic documentary resources), Yamagata was my 'documentary nourishment bank'." In Yamagata, Chinese documentary filmmakers such as Wu came into contact with internationally acclaimed documentary filmmakers (Shinsuke Ogawa, Frederick Wiseman and etc.), whose documentary methods they introduced to the country, making Direct Cinema the dominant aesthetic of Chinese independent documentaries for the last three decades. It is no exaggeration to say that Yamagata in the 1990s shaped the landscape of Chinese independent documentary.
With this in mind, CathayPlay has decided to screen over a dozen Chinese films that have been exhibited at Yamagata over the past thirty years as a way to review its historical influence.
