This weekend I caught Kazuhiro Soda’s Inland Sea (\u6e2f\u753a<\/a>) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real<\/a>.\u00a0 The festival’s opening film about John McEnroe whet my appetite for more documentaries, and I was looking forward to seeing the latest from Soda after enjoying his film Campaign at Japan Society several years back.\u00a0 Inland Sea is set near the hometown of his wife Kiyoko Kashiwagi, who is also the film’s producer.\u00a0 They were both on hand to introduce the film and take part in a post- screening Q&A.\u00a0 In his introduction Soda shared that the film adheres to their Ten Commandments, which include tenets such as no research before shooting, not setting any themes or goals before editing, and paying for the production on their own (to the dismay of producer Kashiwagi).<\/p>\n Inland Sea takes place in the port city of Ushimado in Okayama Prefecture, population 7000.\u00a0 Many of the younger residents have already left, and the documentary’s main subjects are the octagenarians Wai-chan and During the Q&A Soda explained that the reason he chose to make a black and white film (except for the last color scene) was that he wanted to portray a world before modern times, with the cycle of catching fish, selling what you can at market and giving the rest to the cats.\u00a0 Soda and Kashiwagi also revealed that their next project The Big House (which was actually shot at the same time as Inland Sea) will be a departure, as it is their first film shot in the U.S. and it profiles a football stadium in Michigan.<\/p>\n In other Soda related news, a recent article in a local Japanese newspaper mentioned his involvement in a lawsuit against the Japanese government demanding the restoration of voting rights for overseas Japanese.\u00a0 As we look forward to his future films, that outcome will be interesting to follow as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Written by professional Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator\u00a0Stacy Smith\u00a0(Kumamoto-ken\u00a0CIR, 2000-03),\u00a0WIT Life\u00a0is a periodic series about aspects of Japanese culture such as film, food and language.\u00a0 Stacy starts her day by watching\u00a0Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some interesting tidbits and trends along with her\u00a0own observations. This weekend I caught Kazuhiro Soda’s Inland Sea (\u6e2f\u753a) at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[53,263,18,1,36,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-film","category-translatinginterpreting","category-uncategorized","category-wit-life","category-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-bcG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43070"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43207,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43070\/revisions\/43207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/static.wixstatic.com\/media\/eb2c63_4c08a57a835340ea98feeabbcb5839b4~mv2.jpg\/v1\/fill\/w_1410,h_789,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01\/eb2c63_4c08a57a835340ea98feeabbcb5839b4~mv2.jpg\")
Kumiko, respectively a fisherman and the town crier.\u00a0 They are both captivating subjects, but as a cat lover I was most entranced by the stray felines who congregate at the home of transplants to the area who have been feeding them.\u00a0 I was engaged throughout the film’s two hour plus duration, but it definitely could have been cut in places, especially the long takes on the fishing boat.<\/p>\n