My Independent Documentary Film! 自主的ドキュメンタリー！

What is the project? Hello everybody! I'm reaching out for support to shoot a documentary film in the town of Mine, Japan, a city nestled within the mountainous Yamaguchi prefecture. The film will focus on the relationship between humans and landscape through the lens of inhabitants of this town in Southern Japan where this respectful relationship is visible everywhere—multiple generations dependent on the giant Ube Cement Factory, sinkholes used as vegetable fields, and houses distributed according to logics of landscape rather than urban planning of neighborhoods, all in the setting of a landscape hiding limestone caves and thatch grass fields where ancient Jomon people once hunted.

 

Why is this important to me? The film is a significant step toward my visual anthropology studies and allows me to exercise the ethnographic field methods I've studied thus far. After studying Japanese throughout Highschool, I toured Japan and briefly visited the city of Mine in late 2019. It struck me with its humbly built environment characterized by a lifestyle according to shared social considerations and standards with few modern Japanese conveniences. But why a movie? I believe that further exploration into ethnographic film is critical within the field of anthropology to archive and document human culture in this potentially educationally vital medium during the age of rapid globalization. The film will also be an enlightening exercise of personal expression and an opportunity to extend myself artistically in conjunction with the ethnographic study.

 

 

How will the funds be used? Almost all funds gathered through this campaign will be used for lodging and food. I'm attempting to make my stay in the country as long as possible to create an accurate, content-rich, and valuable film. Every 40 dollars is another night in my guesthouse :)

 

What kind of film can I expect to see? I plan on shooting a feature-length film on 4K Raw footage with my Sony FS5 MKII. The film will strive to be a light-hearted impressionistic spotlight on one town's relationship with the breathtaking Western Japanese landscapes that surround it. Notably, the Akiyoshidai Quasi-National Park which is famous for ancient karst landscapes and limestone caves (the longest in Japan!). I'm striving to make a offbeat documentary that is refreshingly fun, engaging, and culturally vibrant!