I'd been invited to the Yamagata Film Festival competition in Oct, 2011, with Imagens de uma cidade perdida. It was my 5th time or so of going there, and I knew it was very near the Fukushima nuclear power station, and I wanted to visit the area damaged by the quake and tsunami. Before going to the festival I'd arranged to do a one-week workshop with the Tokyo Film School, and during that I met a young Japanese woman, Moe Tomoeda, who had studied in Australia and spoke English very well. I asked her whether she'd help me if I could arrange to visit the stricken area along the coast. She happily said yes. I'd be lost without someone to negotiate the language difficulty.
At the festival's opening night party a woman who worked for the festival approached me, and said "Are you Mr. Jost? I'm told you never make any problems or need anything." . I didn't know this was my reputation, though it's pretty much so - the antithesis of a prima donna, I'll take a floor to sleep on if need be. But this time I said, "Well, actually I do need something..." and I asked for some help in going after the festival out to the damaged area of Tohoku, the north eastern province of Japan most damaged by the quake and tsunami. A few days later the woman came back with a contact, and one thing leading to another, Moe and I found ourselves on Katsura-shima, a tiny island out in the Matsushima Bay, near the city of Sendai. We arrived to meet a man who worked for an NGO there to help the place recover. He quickly introduced us to a few people, whisked us around for a quick look, and dropped us off at a kind of B&B where we'd stay. I immediately began shooting landscape shots, and as we met people, I filmed them as well. I told Moe that I didn't want interviews, but rather to let people, as best they could, simply explain what happened that day, what they did, and whatever else they wished. As chance had it, the first person, a woman who'd written some songs and was happy to sing them for us, took us into her house, where I set up to shoot, her kitchen in the background. I found the image cluttered and then noticed a large wide-screen TV, mercifully off, which presented a nice neutral background and I parked her before it. The overhead light worked nicely and having her move 6 inches this way and that, I got a striking image. I decided, somewhat unconsciously, to follow that pattern and in most cases found some black background and good light with the others, except for two men, who I did against white instead. I converted the white to black with some keying in editing, picking up some obvious artifacts, but as it happened I liked those.
As Moe had to return to Tokyo for a medical matter, we had only two and a half days on Katsura-shima, but with luck working for me, we managed to walk away with a 76 minute long film. Editing was pretty fast, except for the technical matter of turning white to black. Afterwards I researched a bit and came up with a few traditional Japanese poems which I thought reflective of what those before the camera had revealed, and I put those in.
The end result I think is a very low-key, reflective work that respects the people before the camera, and movingly allows them to reveal themselves and the transient nature of life.
