阿贺的记忆 Aga no Kioku (2004)

　　In the early 1990s, a documentary crew came to the River Aga in Niigata Prefecture and shot a film about the people who lived along the river. That film, Aga ni Ikiru (Living with the River Aga), took three years to co...展开mplete and was released in 1992. More than ten years later, director Sato Makoto revisits the area where he shot the documentary. Many people have passed away and the landscape itself has also changed; rice paddies are now dry and overgrown. The filmmakers set up a screen in a rice paddy and show Aga Ni Ikiru and the villagers begin to talk about the film and their lives. The owner of the paddy, Hasegawa Miyae, talks about her marriage, and the old people in the village reminisce about their parents and their childhoods around the fireplace. They talk about the day the first electricity generator arrived in the village in the middle of winter. Old stories are retold over shots of winter landscapes. The images capture the present day surroundings of the village, but the songs sung by the old people carry us back into the past and evoke the passage of time which film itself cannot record.