Ogawa Productions

Shinsuke Ogawa documentary about the life of the farmers in Heta Village opposing their resettlement due to the construction of Narita Airport.

In the mid-1970s, protests were waning across Japan after the Red Army scandal of Asama Cottage. In Sanrizuka, people were weary of the violence and the airport was well under construction. As for Ogawa Productions, they invited criticism by pulling out and moving to a quiet village in northern Japan. But when protesters back in Sanrizuka erected a tall tower at the end of one runway, they sent a crew to document what happened. This became the final film of the Sanrizuka Series.

In 1968, Ogawa decided to form Ogawa Productions and locate it at the newly announced construction site of Narita International Airport in a district called Sanrizuka. Ogawa chose to locate his company in the most radical of the villages, Heta. Some farmers immediately sold their land; others vehemently protested and drew the support of social movements across the country. Together they clashed with riot police sent in to protect surveyors, who were plotting out the airport. Summer in Sanrizuka is a messy film – its chaos communicating the passions and actions on the ground.

The movie compiles footage taken by Ogawa Production for a period of more than ten years after the collective moved to Magino village. Unique to this film are fictional reenactments of the history of the village in the sections titled "The Tale of Horikiri Goddess" and "The Origins of Itsutsudomoe Shrine". Ogawa combines all the techniques that were developed in his previous films to simultaneously express multiple layers of time—the temporality of rice growing and of human life, personal life histories, the history of the village, the time of the Gods, and new time created through theatrical reenactment—bring them into a unified whole. The faces of the Magino villagers appear in numerous roles transcending time and space—sometimes as individuals, sometimes as people who carry the history of the village in their memories, sometimes as storytellers reciting myths, and even as members of the crowd in the fictional sequences.

The third film in Ogawa Productions’ Narita/Sanrizuka series of documentaries about the resistance by farmers and activists to the construction of the Narita Airport.

This is Ogawa Productions’ first major film from their Yamagata period. They had already started photography on Magino Village -A Tale but they were drawn to this village deep in the high country above Magino when a particularly cold bout of weather threatened crops. Inevitably, their attention strayed from the impact of weather and geography on the harvest to the “life history” of Furuyashiki Village. On the one hand, Ogawa returns to his roots by playing with the conventions of the science film. At the same time, he discovers a local, peripheral space in which to think about the nation and the state of village Japan. From this “distant perspective” in the very heart of the Japanese mountains, Ogawa discovers a village still dealing with the trauma of global warfare and struggling for survival as their children flee for the cities.

It's the mid 60s. Tokyo needs a new airport. There isn't anywhere in Tokyo to put it, so the government decides on displacing some adjacent villages. The peasants of these villages are not having it. What results is a remarkable act of protest and civil disobedience.

In 1968 the plan by the government to construct a new international airport in the fields of Sanrizuka near Tokyo unleashed one of the most important and enduring social upheavals in the history of postwar Japan. The plan sought to evict thousands of farmers from their lands without any sort of respect for the locals’ rights. Their resistance to eviction was met with extreme violence by the police. Activists from all over the country, including thousands of students, joined with the farmers in their mounting struggle. As the combats in Sanrizuka became more intense and the numbers of police increased, the collective became more involved in the fighting. Sanrizuka: The Three Day War was what Ogawa called a “bullet film”, an immediate and powerful piece of agitprop shot in three days and intended to be seen as quickly and widely as possible. Credit: ICA London

A galvanising documentary about the organised resistance of a group of students barricaded at the Takasaki City University of Economics. The university student struggles at the end of the 1960s in Japan were the culmination of over a decade of protests, social dissent and political unrest. All this gave energy to the student movement, which displayed original and sustained forms of organisation and resistance against the government and which would spread to universities all over the country. Together with the filmmakers of the recently formed collective Jieiso, Ogawa Shinsuke joined a group of students barricading themselves inside the Takasaki City University of Economics. Shot over the course of a year, this film documents the nature of the political discussion and organisation as well as the fierce debates going on among the students and their violent struggles with the authorities. Credit: ICA London

After the waning of the protests in Sanrizuka, Ogawa Pro started questioning the future of the collective and looking for other subjects to film. Following the method developed in the previous films, the filmmakers moved to the slum of Kotobuchi in the port city of Yokohama, where more than 6000 people were struggling to get by without any means of survival, exposed to industrial accidents and diseases. The result is one of the most moving films produced by the collective, a series of beautifully filmed portraits, voicing the silenced stories and songs of a group of people living in this community. Credit: ICA London

This film is a record of the first Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. It reflects the various ways the festival was given shape by nascent global changes embodied by Perestroika, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and many other contemporaneous events.

This film documents student preparations for the final phases of the 1969 protests against the renewal of the security treaty.

Ogawa Production Staff, who moved to Makinomura in Yamagata Prefecture, looks at sericulture, sericulture labor, agriculture ... Let's listen to people's words and stare for the sake of staring ...

This rural documentary features poet Jin Makabe. Thoughts about agriculture, memories, landscapes.

This film was directed by a member of the Ogawa collective, Fukuda Katsuhiko, while they were finishing the documentary Sanrizuka: Heta Village. Fukuda left the collective after this film and continued making documentaries in the village of Heta. Credit: ICA London