A Movie Capital

"Sanrizuka: The Three-Day War" is a documentary by Shinsuke Ogawa chronicling the escalation of conflict surrounding the Japanese government’s plan to build a new international airport on farmland in Sanrizuka near Tokyo. As farmers resisted eviction and activists from across the country joined the struggle, clashes with police intensified, resulting in large-scale confrontations that marked a critical phase of the Sanrizuka movement.

The movie compiles footage taken by Ogawa Production for a period of more than ten years after the collective moved to Magino village. Unique to this film are fictional reenactments of the history of the village in the sections titled "The Tale of Horikiri Goddess" and "The Origins of Itsutsudomoe Shrine". Ogawa combines all the techniques that were developed in his previous films to simultaneously express multiple layers of time—the temporality of rice growing and of human life, personal life histories, the history of the village, the time of the Gods, and new time created through theatrical reenactment—bring them into a unified whole. The faces of the Magino villagers appear in numerous roles transcending time and space—sometimes as individuals, sometimes as people who carry the history of the village in their memories, sometimes as storytellers reciting myths, and even as members of the crowd in the fictional sequences.

Shinsuke Ogawa documentary about the life of the farmers in Heta Village opposing their resettlement due to the construction of Narita Airport.

"Narita: The Peasants of the Second Fortress" (1971) chronicles a decisive phase in the struggle against the construction of the Narita International Airport, as farmers in Sanrizuka adopted new defensive tactics, including the construction of fortified towers and underground shelters. As police forces moved to dismantle these structures, confrontations intensified. The film combines scenes of direct conflict with extended conversations between Ogawa and the farmers, documenting both the physical resistance and the sustained community organizing that defined this stage of the protest.

In the mid-1970s, protests were waning across Japan after the Red Army scandal of Asama Cottage. In Sanrizuka, people were weary of the violence and the airport was well under construction. As for Ogawa Productions, they invited criticism by pulling out and moving to a quiet village in northern Japan. But when protesters back in Sanrizuka erected a tall tower at the end of one runway, they sent a crew to document what happened. This became the final film of the Sanrizuka Series.

After the waning of the protests in Sanrizuka, Ogawa Pro started questioning the future of the collective and looking for other subjects to film. Following the method developed in the previous films, the filmmakers moved to the slum of Kotobuchi in the port city of Yokohama, where more than 6000 people were struggling to get by without any means of survival, exposed to industrial accidents and diseases. The result is one of the most moving films produced by the collective, a series of beautifully filmed portraits, voicing the silenced stories and songs of a group of people living in this community. Credit: ICA London

This film was directed by a member of the Ogawa collective, Fukuda Katsuhiko, while they were finishing the documentary Sanrizuka: Heta Village. Fukuda left the collective after this film and continued making documentaries in the village of Heta. Credit: ICA London

Ogawa Production Staff, who moved to Makinomura in Yamagata Prefecture, looks at sericulture, sericulture labor, agriculture ... Let's listen to people's words and stare for the sake of staring ...

This rural documentary features poet Jin Makabe. Thoughts about agriculture, memories, landscapes.

Film festivals in Japan are being forced to cut back or fold. In 2006 the operation of Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, celebrating almost two decades of history, was transferred from the city government to an incorporated non-profit organization. Focusing on volunteer members of the YIDFF Network, who left their mark during the inaugural festival, director Iizuka Toshio films the festival staff who are caught in the dilemma of servicing the local community and maintaining the standards of an international film festival.

The third film in Ogawa Productions’ Narita/Sanrizuka series of documentaries about the resistance by farmers and activists to the construction of the Narita Airport.