Yamagata: A film festival for these times

In the final moments of the closing party of the 2025 Yamagata International Documentary Festival (YIDFF), two city mascots dance around the hotel banquet room hugging children, and an organiser blows into a shell to get our attention. Upon direction, filmmakers, volunteers, staff, citizens, sponsors and officials gather under the chandeliers to take a group photo. I drain my glass of apple wine and say goodbye to people I have met in the past week, reflecting on what it is that makes this festival feel more than the sum of its films, an event that’s at once specifically located and global in scope, and attuned to the politics of now.

YIDFF is held every two years in October in Yamagata, a small city of around 250,000 in northern Japan in the Tōhoku region, almost three hours from Tokyo by Shinkansen. The festival was founded in 1989 to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the city. As the first documentary festival in Asia, it remains the region’s largest and most important. Its founding is in part attributed to Shinsuke Ogawa, one of the most significant post-war Japanese documentary makers. In 1974, at the invitation of the nearby village of Magino, Ogawa moved his filmmakers collective to the region, where they spent decades living together and making films about farming and village life. Ogawa’s filmmaking principles were based on a deep connection and affection for the subjects and participants. One of primary methods was spending time together – or as Clifford Geertz might say, a ‘deep hanging out’.¹ The inter-relationship between place, art and life permeates not only YIDFF’s slates but all aspects of the festival and events, many of which are volunteer-led and designed to promote local culture and      foster dialogue around how documentary can be used as a tool for social discourse and communing.

This iteration of the festival, its nineteenth, takes place against the backdrop of social division, both globally and domestically. Anti-immigrant sentiment has led to a resurgence of nationalism, with one of its proponents, Sanae Takaichi, on the verge of becoming the country’s first female Prime Minister. Japan is also reckoning with its tumultuous national history, what is remembered, and what is forgotten; 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These themes are close to the surface in Japan, as I note while visiting museums in Tokyo, where many of the exhibitions focus on the importance of art and architecture in embracing diversity and living together with those who are different. These sentiments are echoed in the opening night speeches at YIDFF. Documentary is declared essential in a divided world.

Opening on Thursday evening, the festival is at its buzziest from Friday to Monday 13th, which is a public holiday – Sports Day. The films are organised into competition strands: the International Competition and New Asian Currents along with Perspectives Japan, Special Invitation Films, and Palestine – Memory of the Land. This year, there is also a focus on Direct Cinema. This inclusion strikes me as odd, especially as it centres on American films about American subjects – a canon that I often think of as inward-facing and apolitical. But after learning a bit more about the origins of the festival, and watching some of the films in the Japanese strand, I can see a preference for observational practices and minimal obvious intervention.                         

The festival is spread across a number of sites and pop-up venues, all within about a fifteen-minute radius. Central is the Yamagata Citizens Hall, a large concrete and glass civic building that has two screenings spaces: a 1200-seat hall and a smaller one with fold-up chairs and zabuton cushions to soften the sitting experience. In the light and airy foyer, Q&As with directors spill over from the cinemas. Over the weekend, there is a market with produce including local pour-over coffee, sake and wine as well as cakes and snacks. Sitting awkwardly amongst the regional produce is the Blackmagic camera display with uniformed attendants. Central to the foyer space is a table of publications of previous festival editions for sale, dating back to the 90s. Each day, a new edition of the film newsletter, Sputnik, appears with essays printed in both English and Japanese. Butcher paper with a picture of the city’s official mascot, Hanagata Beni-Chan, has been taped to the wall with markers inviting reflections in all languages on the Yamagata experience. The atmosphere is as intellectual as it is folksy and playful.

Yamagata Citizens Hall. Image: Kim Munro

In Yamagata, documentaries are not just made by those who identify as filmmakers; they’re also a citizen’s pursuit. And in the spirit of Ogawa, a way of making meaning through documenting life as it is lived, together. Beyond the main strands, the smaller programs are plentiful and diverse, many of them dedicated to archives. Yamagata is part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network and this year, the annual conference focuses on moving image archives. Taiwanese and Japanese super-8 home movies are showcased, as are films made by Yamagata residents, and numerous others about the festival and the volunteer network. On the first day, I watch one about the first YIDFF (1989) followed by another about a beef restaurant, curiously called Genghis Khan in a nearby Onsen town. The filmmaker and the restaurant owners are in attendance – all celebrated equally. Another program, Cinema with Us, focuses on documenting the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011, asking how we can make meaning from the lives and landscapes we capture with cameras.

Throughout the week, I notice what makes YIDFF different. Small gestures feel inherently political. There appears to be a flat hierarchy, and by the end of the festival, I am still not sure who the director      or the programmers are; no-one introduced themselves as such. Or maybe their presence is less authorial than it is at other festivals. Instead, the translators become the recurring faces on stage, as do the many volunteers – some of whom have been involved in the festival since the beginning. The YIDFF Network, a volunteer group operating since the first edition, also plays a key role in selecting the films, organising year-long events and a special screening. The volunteers also created the citizen’s prize, presented by two high schoolers in their uniforms at the festival’s closing ceremony. At YIDFF, film watching is a reverential activity; audiences are forbidden from eating, drinking or entering or leaving the cinema when the film is playing. Many venues play a loud buzzing sound at the exact starting time to announce the beginning of the screening. And audiences wait silently for the last credit to roll before the collective applause. I enjoy the discipline and restraint of such formality. Most films are followed by Q&As where  audiences show curiosity about not only the subject matter but also the films’ formal aspects.     .

Yamagata Citizens Hall – collective comments. Image: Kim Munro

Palestine is visibly present, not only in the films programmed and guests in attendance, but also through events which affirm solidarity. A photo exhibition of Palestinians show life under occupation and flyers promote BSD (Boycott, Sanction and Divest) with an anime-style cute raccoon character waving a Palestinian flag. Some Japanese members of Film Workers for Palestine have organised an event called ‘From the river to the sea and the mountains’. The event features a number of speakers including Palestinian-Canadian filmmaker Razan AlSalah along with Japanese activists, organisers and filmmakers. The space is packed with standing room only as we watch videos of their actions – not only in support of Palestine, but also in support of people of Okinawa and the enduring legacy of US military occupation which includes rape, water pollution and suppression of resistance. Emphasising the broad aims of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, and grounded in collective care, the speakers outline their aims of accessibility, solidarity and liberation across all marginalised groups. As befits their commitment to access, their words are automatically transcribed and projected on the wall behind them. A local filmmaker, Komori Haruki, whose YIDFF entry (Spring, On the Shores of Aga, 2025) documents one person’s solitary activism in the long tail of the Minamata disease, speaks about her stand-up protests for Palestine in her hometown. When she began, it was only her and another person; slowly, more people joined in. This is the story of most activist movements, and the kind of change that documentary and festivals like YIDFF can instigate through their           commitment to collective action and communal life. 

YIDFF expands how we can think about documentary, across forms and generations. Night-time      events include a talk by a young projectionist keeping film screenings alive, and a listening session run by a documentary vinyl record enthusiast. During the Shōwa era (1926-1989), and before filmmaking equipment was accessible and affordable, information was pressed onto vinyl to preserve it. Records include Vietnam under raid, meowing cats and a serial killer’s voice. A film criticism workshop runs through the festival with a panel on the future of film criticism. Film criticism is defended as a “path through the noise”. And good film writing is one where the writer finds points of emotional connection with the film that open a space from where to write.

Much of the festival is oriented towards how documentary can be used as a tool for social discussion. This can be attributed to YIDFF’s roots, which are grounded in collective action. Socially-oriented events provide spaces for all festival goers to mix, regardless of status. The festival club, called the New Kommian Club (after the original closed down), is held in a traditional Japanese tatami-mat restaurant over four nights. The space is noisy and the low tables crammed with filmmakers, volunteers, audiences, translators and organisers drinking beer, sake and green tea. The club closes at around midnight, and unofficially continues downstairs outside the konbini (convenience store) for another hour or two. On another night, an enigmatically named group, the Simmering Imoni in-between Films Association, has organised an Imoni (the region’s traditional hotpot of meat and potatoes) event under a bridge in the north of the city. This is the location where the filmmakers from Living on the River Agano who couldn’t afford accommodation camped in the early days of the festival. The organisers call this a ‘sacred site’, in honour of the memory of the filmmakers and their commitment to social justice through documenting the impacts of Minamata disease over three years. On the day of the Imoni Party, an email arrives warning guests that a bear has been seen nearby. Neither bear nor rain dampen the spirit and festival-goers make the trek to gather around the simmering hotpot.

Imoni event. Image: Yiping Lin

On the penultimate day of the festival, the sun emerges, which is fortunate as one of the volunteers has offered to lead a bicycle tour, as he has done for the past two years. Kenichiro, our guide, has gathered some very decent bikes, and with another volunteer, Sally, a Chinese PhD student, leads me and a Canadian couple through the quiet streets. Our first stop, after about fifteen minutes, is his home. His mum brings out a tray of freshly cut persimmons, green tea and some sweets. We take multiple group photos with Ken’s parents before continuing slowly through streets, rice fields, and up a hill to a temple in a nearby town. After a tea ceremony and a tour of the grounds, we head back slowly, pausing for more group photos. One of the Canadians says she’s never taken so many.

As my first visit to YIDFF, I am also aware of how much of the festival I missed. Sometimes it was the language barriers, sometimes the spontaneous conversations that directed me to a particular event; or sometimes it was the elusive festival spell that governs time. And sometimes I just needed to attend to my emails. Documentary theorist Bill Nichols describes film festivals as “a very peculiar kind of culture, like another country, like a regional or distinct subculture”.² This is not always the case. Many festivals, at least the biggest, more commercially-minded ones, feel like they could take place anywhere, with the films selected part of a giant global network. At YIDFF, one definitely feels like they’ve entered into a special subculture where politics, socialising and communitarian values live on through the documentary project.

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival
9 – 16 October 2025
https://www.yidff.jp/

Endnotes