Japanese

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.