North Cormorant Island
2024 Docs Ireland
North Cormorant Island was filmed over ten years in the remote fishing village of Kitaushima (which means North Cormorant Island), on Sado Island, Japan. Until the 1960’s the village was only accessible by road, but it was prosperous, and a couple of hundred people lived there, rice-farming, fishing and raising cattle. But after the road was built young people began to drift to the cities and now there are less than thirty residents, most of them over seventy years old. The film begins following the everyday life of the village, observing the rituals, customs and work of the people who live there. But as the filmmaker spends more time in the village, people begin to talk about their lives, and he begins to reflect on his own childhood in his father’s village in Wales and to think about time, place, mortality and human relationships with the land and the sea.
Directors
John Harford Williams
John Harford Williams was born in the UK, but has lived in Japan since 1988, where he is regarded as a Japanese filmmaker. He made several short films and a documentary about human rights abuses in Sri Lanka (Voices from Sri Lanka, 1994), before making his first Japanese language feature film, Firefly Dreams (Ichiban Utsukushi Natsu), which won several awards at international film festivals, including two Best Feature Awards. His most recent feature film is Another Time (Tabi), which blends traditional Japanese puppetry with live action and was all filmed in the village of Kitaushima.
Yu Iwasaki
Yu Iwasaki is a Tokyo-based filmmaker. His documentary about an Ethiopian asylum seeker in Tokyo, Proof of Family, was selected for Nippon Connection in Frankfurt and won the Audience Award at the Tokyo Documentary Film Festival. Tokyo Wanderer, which follows a stateless man from former Yugoslavia, won Japan Premiere Award at the Sapporo International Short Film Festival. His new documentary Michinoku Power is about a climate activist in Japan.