And Life Goes On
(“Watashi no kisetsu”)2004 / Japanese / Color / 16mm / 107 min
Director: Kobayashi Shigeru
Photography: Kobayashi Shigeru, Matsune Hirotaka
Editing: Sato Makoto, Hata Takeshi
Sound, Producer: Tanabe Nobumichi
Planning, Production Committee: And Life Goes On Production Committee
World Sales: Kyoei
The film is set in the Second Biwako Gakuen, a historical institution for the permanently disabled. It sincerely portrays the life of people who have been living there for forty years, children who are incapable of spontaneous respiration and their families looking after them. Eye to eye with the camera, the appeal of each is amply brought out.
[Director’s Statement] A film that looks at the source of life. “Between the joy and the pain of living, there are individual human lives.” The film opens with these words. This is not a film that questions how people with disabilities should be treated in society, but one that takes “presence” as a human to be the cornerstone for feeling the wonder of life.
Born in 1954 and awarded the 1st JSC (Japanese Society of Cinematographers) Award for his cinematography in Sato Makoto’s Living on the River Agano, Kobayashi Shigeru was the cinematographer of such films as Reach Out for the Elderly’s Care (dir. Tokieda Toshie), Mining the Dark (dir. Fujimoto Yukihisa), and Memories of Agano (YIDFF 2005 program “all about me?”) as well as the director and cinematographer of films including Children in the Cosmos (2000) and A Patch of Blue Sky (2001, YIDFF 2001). |