The village does not appear on the bus company’s map anymore, which is how we found it: we asked the driver what the unmarked stop was for, and he said, for Ogimi, obviously. Eleven people live there. The youngest is sixty-two. They share one truck, one communal freezer, and a shrine whose autumn festival they have refused to cancel for four hundred years, plague years and war years included.<\/p>\n
Our new short film follows the three days before this year’s festival. There is a lot of sitting on floors. There is a debate, conducted at great length and volume, about whether the rice offering should be from Yamada-san’s field or from the co-op, a debate everyone involved has had annually for two decades and visibly enjoys. There is a moment when Harada-san, eighty-eight, climbs the shrine steps with the banner pole because, as she puts it, the pole does not know how old she is.<\/p>\n
What we did not film, because you cannot, is the arithmetic hanging over all of it. Eleven people. A festival that needs eight hands minimum. Everyone we interviewed did the math for us, unprompted, and then carried on preparing as if the math were somebody else’s problem.<\/p>\n
The film is fourteen minutes long and the festival lasts one evening. Both are shorter than they deserve. The link is at the top of the page, and if you watch one thing we have made this year, we would quietly suggest this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ogimi hamlet has eleven residents, one shared truck, and a festival they refuse to cancel. Our new short film is about what eleven people can keep alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}