Film and Video

So Yong Kim at the Women with Vision Festival at Walker

Treeless Mountain, So Yong Kim’s second feature film is back in Minneapolis. The film screened this past March in the Walker Cinema as a part of the Women With Vision series and is now being released nationwide. The Landmark Cinema (Edina) will be screening Treeless Mountain beginning on Friday July 17^th. I strongly encourage anyone who missed the March screening to attend the film or even those who attended to see it again.

The New York Times and critics alike have praised the movie since its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. From the unobtrusive camera , to the child-non-actors, Treeless Mountain is wistfully captivating, telling a story reflecting the director’s memories of growing up in Korea.

“Ms. Kim, her camera hovering gently and unobtrusively around the girls as they play, quarrel and daydream, turns their intimate moments into a quiet, poignant drama of abandonment and resilience.”—A.O. Scott, New York Times

“Rarely has a child’s POV been as evocatively emulated as it is in So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain, a work of tremendous poise and poignancy that assumes and articulates the perspective and emotional tenor of its two juvenile protagonists.”—Nick Schager, Slant Magazine

In March, So Yong was in attendance to introduce the film and answer a few questions from the audience post screening.  You can find the audio files from this conversation along with a previous blog post about the film on the Walker website.

For more information about So Yong Kim & the film, visit the Oscilliscope website and the Landmark website for screening times.

Question: Which of the following 70s artists was the most prolific filmmaker?

Robert Smithson

Walter de Maria

Joan Jonas

Nancy Holt

Richard Serra

Ana Mendieta

Mary Kelly

Vito Acconci

Bruce Nauman

Richard Long

Dennis Oppenheim

OK, the answer is easy, if only owing to the title of this post. But the question is worth asking, because:

1) The fact that Ana Mendieta made nearly 80 films has never been very widely known. These films, shot between 1973 and 1981, most using a Super-8 camera, not only bring an intriguing new dimension to Mendieta’s overall body of work, but also raise new questions about it in relation to that of the above artists. And,

2) Fourteeen of her films are on view for free in the Walker’s lecture room through the end of March, some for the first time publicly.

The Walker has an in-house Mendieta expert in director Olga Viso, who included 10 of the artist’s films in the 2005-2006 retrospective Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972­ – 1985, which she organized while she was at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

After the films went on view here last week, I got a chance to talk with Viso, who is speaking on Mendieta and showing some of the films at MCAD this Wednesday in a free lunchtime lecture. She noted that for well over a decade after Mendieta’s death in 1985, a compilation of her films was circulating, but it was a videotape of the films as they were projected on a wall: “You couldn’t even really read most of them,” she said. While organizing the retrospective, Viso met with Mendieta’s sister. “She showed me a bag of Super 8 film reels. She was trying to start work on digitizing them; a handful had been done at that point. I really urged her to conserve the reels themselves for posterity, and agreed that it was important to digitize them.”

Ultimately, Viso contributed some funds for the films’ restoration, and 10 of the Mendieta films were screened as part of her retrospective. “Because of technology, we were able to present the films side-by-side with drawings or performance residue,” Viso said. “It was really revelatory to people, to see them as Ana intended, at a large scale and on wall in relation to her photographs. (A review in Frieze magazine noted that “the Super-8 films with which [Mendieta] carefully documented her actions form the show’s radiant heart.”)

Mendieta had always been looked at as a photographer who did that work in relation to performance, Viso says, if only because her photos more readily accessible. Now, with more exposure and consideration of her films, a different art-historical take on Mendieta has emerged.

“The films have been critical in the re-evaluation of her work and being seen in a broad national and international context. Before her work was either seen as Latin American art or feminist art. Those constructs are relevant, but there’s more to her work and these films allow that to manifest itself.”

Finally, the films have a special resonance based around the absence of the artist herself, who, like several of her colleagues whose careers flowered in the 1970s, died too soon.

(Images © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection / Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York)

Astra Taylor, Canadian director of Žižek! has conquered and surpassed the traditional aesthetic realm of documentary filmmaking, by moving past the talking head. Her new film, Examined Life takes eight philosophers to the streets, placing them in non-traditional settings (Slavoj Žižek, for example, talks about the fascism of ecology in the midst of a garbage dump). Needless to say, it’s pretty interesting.

I found a really great interview with Taylor on the Spoutblog – here are a few highlights:

(On her definition of philosophy)

For me, one really simple definition of philosophy I like is that philosophers are people who persist in asking childish questions. Maybe questions that are timeless and eternal and ones in which there is no consensus on the answer. Maybe that’s why some people think it’s an indulgent, pointless exercise, but I don’t see it that way.

Spout: For a film that’s almost entirely comprised of people talking about philosophical concepts, Examined Life is quite dynamic and visually stimulating – how did you conceive the aesthetic for it?

Taylor: I became very invested in the kinetic element of filmmaking. I came to filmmaking by accident. I wasn’t schooled in it, I don’t really know any of the formal language of cinema, I don’t understand three point lighting. One of the biggest letdowns of the documentary format is that its talking heads. People never say that as if it’s a good thing. So when I decided to make an ensemble piece about philosophy, the question that concept raises is will the film just going to be a series of talking heads? So I was thinking about ways to do something inexpensive and yet still make a film that was monologue driven and mostly propelled by speech. I was thinking about different options and of course considered animation. It seems like an obvious tool when you’re making a pedagogical film. I decided I really didn’t want to do that. I decided early on I wanted to make a film devoid of any bells and whistles like that. I wanted to make something very simple and formal.

Examined Life will be screened on Friday, March 13 as a part of the Women with Vision Series in the Walker Cinema. Director Astra Taylor will be in attendance to introduce the film.

3D Sun

“I feel like I’m a woman with vision — in 3D,” says my fully dimensioned friend Melissa Butts, co-director of 3D Sun and principal force behind the Minneapolis-based Melrae Pictures.

“Where I don’t consider myself a woman with vision is in the sense of being a female director,” she continues. “I happened to co-direct this film [with Barry Kimm]. Will I direct other films? Not necessarily. It’s not my passion. But I have wanted to be a pioneer in this revolutionary field of 3D storytelling.”

Butts’s 3D Sun, comin’ at ya this weekend as part of the Walker’s “Women With Vision: Dimensions,” is a hot property in many ways, as well as the rare movie of any depth whose stated intent is thoroughly fulfilled. In the very first moments of the 22-minute film, over an eyepopping image of the titular fireball, a female narrator promises: “You are going to see a star, an astrophysical object, in three dimensions, with great resolution, for the very first time.” Ah, if only all movies offered such truth in advertising.

Visionary indeed, Butts was far ahead of the curve in recognizing hi-def 3D — the future of commercial movies, many claim — as an emerging market. Four years ago, she delivered a stereoscopic version of another outer-space documentary she made with Kimm, Future Frontiers: Mars, to the Science Museum of Minnesota, which had just installed a 3D digital projection system in one of its theaters. The challenge of inventing the wheel — or reel, virtually speaking — was precisely the appeal for Butts.

“You get intoxicated by the challenge of pushing the big rock up the hill, trying to figure it all out,” she says. “There weren’t a lot of people doing [digital 3D] then. What we were doing was more than cutting edge. It was like bleeding edge.”

3D Sun, too, has been “up-rezzed,” this time to giant-screen IMAX for its current screenings at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

At the Walker this weekend (every half-hour in the Lecture Room, from Friday thru Sunday), the film’s third dimension will emerge through the combination of two carefully synched Panasonic HD projectors, a gigantic server, and a special silver screen.

When asked to measure the film’s gargantuan size, Butts (who’ll speak in the Lecture Room at 4 p.m. on Saturday) says that she and Kimm, working in close collaboration with NASA and various computer animators from Minnesota and beyond, amassed some 150,000 .tif files — i.e., 75,000 for each eye.

Alas, the numbers of 3D filmmakers aren’t so evenly proportioned when it comes to gender.

Butts was one of only three women presenting work at 3DX, a film festival held in Singapore last November. The others — Catherine Owens (co-director of U2 3D) and Charlotte Huggins (co-producer of Journey to the Center of the Earth) — realized the extent of their minority and, as Butts recalls, said to her, “Is this crazy or what? There are only three women here — us!”

Even having two female colleagues is rare in a milieu where, Butts says, “you kind of get used to being one of the few women in the room.” A Parisian woman whom Butts met at a festival in France last summer suggested they form a Women’s Stereoscopic Society by way of banding together.

“3D Sun was screening at this [French] festival,” Butts says, “but there were no women presenting content to the audience, no women talking about their role in digital cinema, 3D or otherwise. We all noticed it.”

Which, Butts agrees, is another way of noting the continued necessity of a women’s film festival.

Examined Life

Not to get all Bill & Ted in this excellent adventure, but what would ol’ Socrates have made of 3D Sun?

Beyond the near-certain probability that the flick would’ve flipped his wig, we can’t know how the ancient philosopher (“The unexamined life is not worth living”) would have reviewed it. But thanks to Astra Taylor’s Examined Life, screening March 13 at “Women With Vision,” we can study Martha Nussbaum’s take on social democracy, Peter Singer’s meditation on the (im)morality of conspicuous consumption, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s ode to human evolutionary cosmopolitanism, and Cornel West’s theories of death and desire. Slavoj Zizek, star of Taylor’s earlier doc Zizek!, appears in the film beside a garbage heap as he recycles his own notions of ecological ideology.

As I wrote in Variety from Toronto last fall, Examined Life serves as a playful riposte to the idea that movies are mainly for turning one’s mind off. The same could be said of the other “WWV” films I’ve seen and loved, including Claire Simon’s reproductive rights tract God’s Offices (a suitably unplayful riposte to Juno, one could say) and Katia’s Sister by Mijke de Jong, who trains a piercing lens on a Russian emigrant girl’s rough acclimation to life in Amsterdam in a manner that recalls Rosetta.

Before you say there’s nothing new under the sun, examine how life in these distinctly Dardennes-esque dramas appears different for having been captured not by brothers, but sisters.

In an attempt to conjure up one word to describe So Yong Kim’s second film, Treeless Mountain, I immediately came up with melancholic. The story, based loosely on So Yong Kim’s childhood, revolves around two children, Jin and Bin, who in essence are abandoned by their mother when she places them in temporary holding with their aunt, referred to as Big Aunt.  With the summer ending and their mother still gone, the girls are moved to a farm owned by their grandparents.

Treeless Mountain

 The visual component of the film surpasses the singular description of melancholic. Alone, melancholic sets the viewer on the wrong foot, the wrong emotional key upon viewing.  Clearly one adjective cannot describe Treeless Mountain; indeed it needed at least two words. Within the story So Yong Kim tells, an almost lush array of visual undertones surface. Jin, the older child in the Treeless Mountain (played by Hee Yeon Kim), doesn’t do much in the traditional sense of acting. Most of what Jin portrays is a simple, natural performance of a child. It is here, in the captive space of So Yong Kim’s observational camera, where the story truly begins to surface and the second description of the film became apparent-wistful. There is a softness in the long takes and thoughtful close-ups of Treeless Mountain. Because the lens is focused on the methodical yet unscripted movements of the children, the film captures the sincerity of youth.

Throughout Treeless Mountain, the sisters work together, perhaps not intentionally, to not only to survive but to fill a void in each other. There is no music in the film, which lends to the wistful style of So Yong Kim’s cinematic eye, to enhance the interactions between the siblings. It is here that the bond of the sisters shines through, and made clear that by surviving and taking care of her younger sister, Jin has filled the missing component in her heart.

 Treeless Mountain marks the first film of the Walker’s Women with Vision series. Director So Yong Kim will be in attendance on Friday March 6^th in the Walker Cinema to introduce the film.

Cannes, France–

Halfway through the Cannes Film Festival, which wraps up this weekend with the revelation of the Palme d’Or and other awards, two absurdly fortunate and extremely busy cineastes from Minneapolis somehow manage via phone, text, e-mail, and various psychic fax messages to schedule one those “ What’ve you liked so far?” chats. (Don’t worry: No spoilers here.)

But by accident, the curator and critic–the Walker Art Center’s Sheryl Mousley and moi–run into one another two hours before the agreed-upon time while queuing for the Dardennes brothers’ Lorna’s Silence, and decide to observe their own quiet. No talking until after the movie becomes Rule #1–the only rule, in fact–of our Dogme of Q&As.

Yet as rules are meant to be broken, we agree to make small talk in French (e.g., “ Le nouveau vol de NWA est magnifique, n’est-ce pas?”) until the lights go down. Then we suspend the discussion even further while trekking through the gargantuan Palais des Festivals to the fourth-floor meeting place known as Le Club. Eventually it trickles out, even before the microphone is on (quelle horreur!), that while we’re somewhat split on the Dardennes’ latest–Mousley’s thumb points straight up, mine sideways–we’re both big fans of Le Club, in particular its jus d’orange gratuit.

So roll tape–and cheers to free orange juice in Cannes!

Mousley, peeling back the curtain on the Film/Video Department’s theater of operations, explains that “judging the film is how everything begins” for her and assistant curator Dean Otto. As well it should. Last year, for example, Mousley’s Cannes screening of The Mourning Forest–“ a film I adored immediately,” she says–led to the Walker visit of Japanese director Naomi Kawase in March. “ Scheduling is always a major hurdle,” says Mousley. “ Filmmakers are filmmakers; when they’re not in production, they’re in pre-production or doing publicity or taking a rare vacation. But with Naomi, it worked perfectly for her to come in conjunction with the Women With Vision’ series.”

Though the next such series remains nine months away, Cannes isn’t too early for Mousley to focus on films by women here. The curator naturally has her eye on Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s brilliantly surreal La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman) as well as Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, which hadn’t yet screened when we met for OJ. Lamenting the dearth of women-directed films this year, I joke that maybe multimillion dollar baby (and Hillary Clinton supporter) Clint Eastwood could earn honorary inclusion in “ Women With Vision” for his direction of the strikingly feminist Changeling (starring Angelina Jolie); and perhaps he could bank frequent flyer miles to Minneapolis for having previously visited the Walker for the very first Regis Dialogue back in 1990, back in the pre-Unforgiven days when proclaiming Clint as an auteur was something close to radical.

“ Of course I’ve looked into whether Clint would come back [for another Regis],” says Mousley. “ But what I’ve heard from Pierre Rissient”–the Gallic “ man of cinema” featured in critic Todd McCarthy’s like-titled documentary–“ is that [Eastwood] doesn’t like to revisit old territory.” Not geographic territory, anyway, as Eastwood does trod generic turf repeatedly: Changeling, wherein Jolie plays a mother grieving for her lost son and suffering the rampant sexism of 20s and 30s L.A., harkens back particularly to the director’s Mystic River and A Perfect World as a critique of socially sanctioned exploitation and abuse.

Our juice glasses still half-full, like le festival itself, Mousley and I note that Changeling is the likely Palme pick for a jury headed by Mystic River’s Sean Penn. But Palme or not, Eastwood’s star vehicle won’t face the slightest challenge in finding a screen, whereas one of the Walker’s chief missions is to usher in the unknown and otherwise endangered. To this end, Mousley is meeting tomorrow with a group of Iranian film exporters to discuss the details of a continued collaboration that would bring more Iranian cinema to Minneapolis at a time when it’s sorely needed anywhere in the United States.

“ Iranian cinema is tricky now, for obvious reasons,” says Mousley. “ Paying film rentals can be complicated, and then, of course, there’s the problem with visas for visiting [Iranian] filmmakers. So it’s very good for us to get together [with Iranians] to work through strategies for keeping these films on the [U.S. festival and museum] circuit.”

And with that, the conversation is fini: Mousley is heading to another meeting in the Marché du Film, and I’m gonna sprint up the Croisette to the Directors’ Fortnight, where Albert Serra’s El Cant Dels Ocells (Birdsong) will be featuring the brilliant screen acting debut of my Cinema Scope editor and friend Mark Peranson, playing Joseph, earthly father of…oh Lord, I almost gave it away!

Upon winning the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, “ Japan’s leading woman director”–Naomi Kawase, now in the “ spotlight” of the Walker’s Women With Vision series–spoke in Buddhist terms of the benefits of difficulty. “ You try to find strengths–and I don’t mean money, cars, or clothing,” she said. “ It’s not necessarily something visible. It can be the wind, the light, the memory of the ancients…”

Nature and ancestry are indeed key elements of Kawase’s The Mourning Forest, whose weighty production stumbled a bit en route to the Cannes stage–merely by way of gathering strength, its maker would say. (She’ll have more to say about the film when introducing it at 7pm Thursday.) If anything, though, the relation between past and present–the focus of this year’s “ Vision” program, as it happens–bears even more directly on the filmmaker’s little-seen documentaries.

Kawase–still not 40 years of age–had made more than a dozen docs before her first narrative feature, Suzaku, took its own Cannes prize, the Camera d’Or, in 1997. Since then, she has made a half-dozen more nonfiction works, all exceedingly rare in the U.S., including Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth (2001) and Birth/Mother (2006)–nature and ancestry, past and present intertwined in both, each film connected inextricably to the other.

(Some practical details: Birth/Mother screens at the Walker on Thursday at 5:30, just before Kawase introduces The Mourning Forest, while Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth screens the following afternoon in room 155 of Nicholson Hall, introduced by the director and co-presented by the U of M’s Institute for Advanced Study Film Collaborative and its Consortium for the Study of the Asias. Both of these screenings are free–and not to be missed.)

The more experimental of the two (in a close contest), Sky, Wind finds Kawase combining discrete audio and video tracks in complex and sometimes disorienting ways. Clips of the director’s teary phone talk with the biological father she had never known–“ How did you get my number?” he asks, among other, more generous things–are played over benign images of people watching TV, as if to measure the oceanic distance between raw familial drama and an evening’s entertainment. (Kawase has made it clear in interviews–as if it wasn’t obvious in her films–that she’s no fan of the Hollywood style.) Elsewhere, shots of nature–slow pans up the stems of dead or dying plants, for example–appear immediately poignant in the context of the filmmaker’s own separation from her roots. (Kawase’s great aunt Uno–star of Birth/Mother–raised the girl from birth at her niece’s request.)

If the soundtrack of Sky, Wind bears the burden of conveying the film’s story (i.e., Kawase attempts to come to terms with her father), the visuals serve as the director’s reflection on the details–as the present rather than the past. This autobiographical doc also juggles elements of fiction–as when a clapperboard appears in a long scene of Kawase talking to an artist about getting a tattoo to match her dad’s. What’s amazing about the presence of that clapperboard isn’t so much that it breaks the spell of nonfiction, but that it gets us thinking about the fundamental artifice of most any documentary, a personal one not least. Clapperboard or no, isn’t “ reality” already being directed in a film whose maker chooses to visit a tattoo artist and roll the camera? Here, Kawase effectively collapses the distinction between her life and her art–much as a tattoo does, you might say. To etch one’s story in celluloid or on the body itself is to leave a permanent record–or, in some cases, a scar.

Birth/Mother–naturally–is about pain. Its first words are Kawase’s, spoken from offscreen to her great aunt Uno–“ Why did you adopt me?”–over the close-up image of something indistinctly bloodier than a Peckinpah frame, perhaps a placental sac. Filming while her elder was in the final stages of dementia, Kawase dares to begin the doc with her confrontational approach to the 90-year-old Uno, who’s reduced by the conversation to tearful quivering. It’s a fascinatingly bold, even abrasive film, never more so than in extreme close-ups of Uno’s bruised, sagging flesh in a bathtub–shocking images, these, beautiful only through the viewer’s strenuous effort (and not necessarily then).

Nearly every image in the first half carries with it the smell of death, reminding us that it’s not a film about a relationship, but about the end of a relationship–the end of a life. At one point Kawase sings “ Happy Birthday” (in English) to her great aunt and giggles as the old woman struggles to blow out candles with her thin breath. As much as the 1970s’ American family docs of Western legend, Birth/Mother is unsparingly direct–and the gutsiest film of Kawase’s that I’ve seen. The film’s eventual focus on Kawase’s pregnancy–culminating in the emergence of baby boy Mitsuki–relives it only somewhat of its ingeniously harsh vibe. Kawase fictionalized this material for the relatively gentle Mourning Forest, in which a young nurse befriends an old man with dementia, following him on a quest to find his wife’s gravesite. But Birth/Mother plays as a work of the toughest love–a cathartic purge, seemingly at the expense of a dying woman’s final memories. (Message: Past and present may indeed be closely connected–but the world belongs to the living.)

Kawase’s films–her narrative films in particular–have been widely compared to those of Ozu and Naruse for taking intimate approaches to interpersonal relations. Not surprisingly, the work has proven too intimate for some. Writing from Cannes, Esquire’s Mike D’Angelo–not a critic generally known for his great sensitivity–issued sarcastic advice to Mourning’s bereaved heroine: “ Talk to a shrink, lady.” Expressing himself more tactfully, the Buenos Aires-based IMDB writer who notes Kawase’s “ exhibitionism” does have a point. Both Birth/Mother and the narrative feature Shara–labors of love in the literal sense–climax with Kawase’s delivery of Mitsuki, while Sky, Wind contains glimpses of the then 27-year-old filmmaker receiving her first Cannes prize. “ After Kurosawa and Oshima, I think Kawase will be the next internationally known name among this generation of [Japanese filmmakers],” said… Kawase!

The director, a noted lover of basketball, is hardly her winning team’s only cheerleader, as evidenced in a post-Grand Prix message to GreenCine Daily from a fan named Beruk: “ I’m so happy for Naomi Kawase! Please marry me Naomi!” Note to Beruk: Sorry, she’s taken. Might you find what you’re looking for in the wind, the light?

During the last week of March, Walker’s Women with Vision festival offers the rare opportunity to meet Japanese director Naomi Kawase, who’s not only Japan’s leading female filmmaker but also one of its most internationally known independent filmmakers. It’s no wonder everybody is heading for tickets of her latest film Mogari No Mori (The Mourning Forest) which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival last year, and which will be introduced and discussed by her in person.

But Shara (Sharasojyu) the other fiction film screened in the “ Spotlight on Kawase” series should not be missed either. The film contains an amazing scene that blew me away the first time I saw it, and did so every time I have seen it since. You shouldn’t pass on the chance to see it in the cinema.

The 7 minutes long dance scene I am talking about is surely not the only reason for seeing the film, but it will strike you emotionally in a way that seldom happens. It’s neither pathos nor a melodramatic constellation that is touching about this scene. Its stirring momentum is more a healing force that evolves out of the street dance of the city festival one of the protagonists is taking part in. There is the physicality of the voices and the energy of body movements, as well as the rhythm of singing or rather shouting, which provides a connecting bond for the group dancing as well as for the people watching. And all of this is transmitted by the film in a way that the liberating force of healing becomes perceptible to the audience of the film, too.

There is another reason why Shara, which was released in 2003, is interesting in terms of Kawase’s work. Kawase herself plays Reiko, who is pregnant in the second half of the film, and at the end she gives birth to a little boy at her home among her family. One year later Naomi Kawase is pregnant herself and gives birth to her son Mitsuki. And she includes scenes of her giving birth in the documentary Tarachime (Birth/Mother). So we have two birth scenes, both with the same woman and directed by her as well, and the fictional scene precedes the one in the documentary.

During the last week of March, Walker’s Women with Vision festival offers the rare opportunity to meet Japanese director Naomi Kawase, who’s not only Japan’s leading female filmmaker but also one of its most internationally known independent filmmakers. It’s no wonder everybody is heading for tickets of her latest film Mogari No Mori (The Mourning Forest) which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival last year, and which will be introduced and discussed by her in person.

But Shara (Sharasojyu) the other fiction film screened in the “ Spotlight on Kawase” series should not be missed either. The film contains an amazing scene that blew me away the first time I saw it, and did so every time I have seen it since. You shouldn’t pass on the chance to see it in the cinema.

The 7 minutes long dance scene I am talking about is surely not the only reason for seeing the film, but it will strike you emotionally in a way that seldom happens. It’s neither pathos nor a melodramatic constellation that is touching about this scene. Its stirring momentum is more a healing force that evolves out of the street dance of the city festival one of the protagonists is taking part in. There is the physicality of the voices and the energy of body movements, as well as the rhythm of singing or rather shouting, which provides a connecting bond for the group dancing as well as for the people watching. And all of this is transmitted by the film in a way that the liberating force of healing becomes perceptible to the audience of the film, too.

There is another reason why Shara, which was released in 2003, is interesting in terms of Kawase’s work. Kawase herself plays Reiko, who is pregnant in the second half of the film, and at the end she gives birth to a little boy at her home among her family. One year later Naomi Kawase is pregnant herself and gives birth to her son Mitsuki. And she includes scenes of her giving birth in the documentary Tarachime (Birth/Mother). So we have two birth scenes, both with the same woman and directed by her as well, and the fictional scene precedes the one in the documentary.

Film Critic and Walker Blogger Rob Nelson, clearly a man of many hats, is currently teaching a documentary film studies class at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He asked his students to weigh in on Nina Davenport’s documentary Operation Filmmaker, which will be playing at the Walker this Thursday (It’s a free screening!) as part of the Women With Vision Film Festival. Head over to the MinnPost page to read what they had to say.