Shigeru Kobayashi

Ten years ago, the Kogures moved from Tokyo to a satoyama area (an area where traditional sustainable agriculture has been long practiced) in a snowy mountain village in Echigo-Tsumari where they repaired an old thatched farmhouse and began growing organic, pesticide-free rice. Their life may appear unrestrained and free of worldly cares but they cannot make it alone. All the work is done together with their cheerful neighbors. Then, in the spring of 2011, an earthquake strikes on the border of Nagano and Niigata prefectures. The Kogures’ house is destroyed, but they decide to rebuild. An adventure told in a fantastical tone that expresses the joy of living with a sometimes harsh natural world.

Satō Makoto discovered documentary film when he visited Minamata (well known as the former site of an environmental disaster) as a student, and worked on Katori Naotaka’s The Innocent Sea. While touring Japan with the film, he met people who lived by the polluted Agano River in Niigata and decided to make a film about them. Living there with seven crew members for three years, Living on the River Agano was completed in 1992 and showed people who live with the river and work in agriculture and fishing, quietly probing the cruelty of nature destroyed. Ten years later, and after attending several funerals of people who appeared in the first feature, the team returned to the area. The resulting film Memories of Agano is a ghostly poem on people, fields, stories, songs and buildings receding into absence, the power of images and the strength of sound to revive the past.

In 1964, a chemical factory in Niigata Prefecture dumped mercury into the Agano River, the beginning of a manmade tragedy that would affect locals for years to come. Mercury poisoning led to high occurrences of Minamata disease, a neurological syndrome that causes severe physical and psychological ailments and death. Sato Makoto and his crew of seven spent three years in Niigata documenting the life and thoughts of locals.