The Three Day War in Narita

Shinsuke Ogawa / Japan / 1970 / Czech Premiere / 48 min.

synopsis

The seven-part film series Sanrizuka, named after an area near Tokyo, was filmed by the Ogawa Pro collective between 1968 and 1977. This third instalment focuses on the resistance of farming families against the third compulsory acquisition of their land for the construction of an airport. The film crew captures the scuffles with the police in the thick of the jostling crowd, observing the farmers’ outbursts of anger and pain from an intimate vantage point. Tense moments of struggle alternate with calmer passages, in which the camera is drawn to the billowing smoke rising from the bonfires lit on the barricades.

The individual episodes of the 12-hour series documented the expropriation of land in the area of what is now Narita International Airport from the perspective of both the local residents and the student movement, which had travelled there to support the resistance. The collective adapted their filming equipment to withstand rough handling amidst the clashes. The third instalment of the series was shot in just three days and was soon released as a “ciné-tract” – an urgent counter-narrative refuting the claims put forward by the authorities that the land expropriation had been successful. As part of Ogawa’s distribution strategy, the films were screened outside cinemas, in venues close to the local population, thereby enabling the collective to effectively mobilise them to actively support the movement.

biography

Shinsuke Ogawa (1935–1992), the “filmmaker of the soil”, was one of the two most important Japanese post-war documentary filmmakers (alongside Noriaki Tsuchimoto), the founder of the Ogawa Pro collective (1967–1994) and initiator of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. His work is characterised by his closeness to his protagonists – rebellious students and farmers – and his desire to further their cause, as well as by sensitive observation and collective co-authorship. The Sanrizuka series was followed by the Magino series about rice farmers. Before the collective began filming, he lived and worked alongside the farmers for a year. In 2017, Ji.hlava IDFF presented a retrospective of his work.