Of Sea and Soil: The Cinema of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to Ghent in Belgium at the beginning of April to participate in the Courtisane Festival 2019. The Festival was holding a mini-retrospective of the documentaries of��Tsuchimoto Noriaki and I was invited to give a talk, entitled�����Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Minamata, and Japanese Documentary," and introduce a couple of his films. It was a wonderful festival���small but focused���and I was thrilled to see that most of the Tsuchimoto films were practically sold out. It was also a pleasure to see Paolo Rocha���s��A Ilha de Moraes (1984),��an intriguing documentary by the Portuguese director about the Portuguese writer and diplomat��Wenceslau de Moraes, who ended up living the last portion of his life in Japan.��

Courtisane also produced a catalog of the Tsuchimoto retrospective, in collaboration with��Cinematek in Brussels, which did an Ogawa Shinsuke retro. I contributed an essay to��Of Sea and Soil: The Cinema of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke��entitled�����Tsuchimoto��Noriaki and Environment in Documentary Film,��� which attempts to consider how Tsuchimoto���s environmentalism is based not simply in his film content but also his film form.��