Devotion investigates the extremely complex and heirarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke.  Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement of the late 60's; the fight by farmers to save their land from government confiscaton for the Narita airport at Sanrizuka; and the village life of a small farming community, Magino Village, in northern Japan.  These heartbreaking and sometimes funny stories have never been told on film before. Rare footage, stills, and diaries with interviews with Oshima Nagisa, Hara Kazuo and Robert Kramer make this historical inquiry visually exciting as well as valuable.

Devotion: A Film About Ogawa Productions

Documentary about the great Japanese documentary maker Tsuchimoto Noriaki made a couple of years before his death.

Cinema Is about Documenting Lives: The Works and Times of Noriaki Tsuchimoto

Noriaki Tsuchimoto, a documentary filmmaker known for his series films on Minamata disease, travelled to Afghanistan in 1988 for the production of the film "Afghan Spiring", during which he developed alcoholism. In 1996, after several years of hospitalization and treatment, he accepted a long interview with his close friends, cameraman Koshiro Otsu and producer Tetsujiro Yamagami.

Tsuchimoto Noriaki

Documentary on the life of Teruo Kawamoto, a leader of Minamata disease activism

Minamata: The Person Who Dug the Well

The Kabul National Museum, once known as the "face of Afghanistan," was destroyed in 1993. We filmed the most important cultural treasures of the still-intact museum in 1988: ancient Greco-Roman art and antiquitied of Hellenistic civilization, as well as Buddhist sculpture that was said to have mythology--the art of Gandhara, Bamiyan, and Shotorak among them. After the fall of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992, some seventy percent of the contents of the museum was destroyed, stolen, or smuggled overseas to Japan and other countries. The movement to return these items is also touched upon. The footage in this video represents that only film documentation of the Kabul Museum ever made.

Traces: The Kabul Museum 1988

The daily life of the citizens of Kabul during the civil war: the bazaar, mosques, the literacy movement awarded honors by UNESCO, women's education, and English school. Scenes of live and self-defense in nearby farm villages. The lives of war orphans. And a new holiday-the anniversary of the revolution, seen in the faces of the 200,000 people gathered to celebrate. This is a document of the only "democratic republic" in the West.

Another Afghanistan: Kabul Diary 1985

In 1994, Minamata disease victims held an exhibition in Tokyo where portraits of the all 1080 people who had died of the disease by that time were displayed.