Minamata - The Victims and Their World (1971) Minamata - Kanja-san to sono sekai
Movie Name: Minamata: The Victims and Their World
Original Name: Minamata: Kanja-san to sono sekai
Directed: Noriaki Tsuchimoto
Genre: Documentary
Runtime: 123 mins
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Subtitles: English (muxed)
Plot / Synopsis:
In the small town of Minamata in Kyushu, far from the metropolitan center, the fertilizer company Chisso built a factory to take advantage of cheap labor and commenced dumping mercury-filled wastewater into the nearby sea. Soon residents began exhibiting symptoms of a mysterious illness, a happening that would eventually develop into the worst case of environmental pollution in postwar Japan. Noriaki Tsuchimoto visits the patients and their families who sued Chisso and listens to their voices. His camera gently lifts the veil that had obscured them and reveals their reality. MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD is impressive in how it stands on the side of the patients, not only providing a collage of individual portraits, but also an understanding of the their everyday lives.
Review:
"Minamata," the Japanese-made documentary that opened the Film Forum's fall season last night, is persuasive and often shocking evidence of the present dangers of pollution. Although the feature occasionally might call for fuller explanations, the awesome, sometimes death-dealing blight that struck Minamata, the fishing and manufacturing town on the island of Kyushu, is a sobering, forceful case history that leaves little doubt as to the dire results of man's current approach to the disposal of modern-living wastes.
For the record, Minamata can point to its simple fishermen who have worked its waters for centuries, a large, modern fertilizer factory and, for the last two decades or so, to the sad distinction of being the home of "Minamata disease." This is attributed to the mercury-poisoned effluvia from that factory that made the cycle from fish to humans whom it incapacitated—or killed—in various ways.
Noriaki Tsuchimoto, the director of "Minamata," who is a stranger to this observer, and a fairly large complement of associates shot their black-and-white footage in Minamata, its environs and Osaka in 1971, largely in question-and-answer sessions with victims or their survivors.
The results are either dolefully factual or pitiably tearful but nearly always painfully arresting Dedication and devotion are obvious in the help given by affected families, friends and hospital personnel to children and grown ups afflicted by cerebral palsy-like retardation, paralysis, blindness or deafness.
If these touching scenes in a major portion of the film are subdued, "Minamata," nevertheless, strongly implies and occasionally illustrates what appears to be big industry and governmental apathy before it builds to a literally riotous climax as the diseased and their sympathizers descend on a meeting in Osaka of the impassive president and board of directors of the Chisso company, operators of the plant, to demand reparations and justice.
One would like to read more details in the literal English subtitles such as the specifics of the infection or the newspaper accounts of last July, which listed 428 victims, 69 of whom died. An epilogue points out that the Chisso company paid about £l.5-million to 138 victims last year.
On the basis of the bleak record poignantly and pointedly presented in "Minamata," that statistic doesn't seem to be the answer to the terrible, perhaps portentous, problem of pollution.
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