★ "Spring, on the Shores of Aga" Film Information
[Credits]
"Spring, on the Shores of Aga"
English Title: Spring, on the Shores of Aga
2025 / Japan / DCP / 64 min
©︎Komori Haruka
Cast: Hideto Hatano, Chikako Kobayashi, and others
Director/Cinematography/Editing: Haruka Komori
Sound Recording (Memorial Gathering): Takuya Kawakami
Proposal/English Title Translation: Hikaru Toda
English Subtitle Translation: Dean Donai Translation Office
Planning/Production Cooperation: Maiko Kiyota, Hikaru Toda, Takeshi Hata, Kasama Film Co., Ltd.
Promotional Visual: Takeshi Inoue
Trailer: Kota Nakamura
Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 Commission Project / Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Yamagata Documentary Dojo 6 Participating Work
★ Trailer
Even if you have Minamata disease, it's good to be alive. Do lots of fun things.
Isn't it okay to have that kind of movement too?
Hideto Hatano, a supporter of the Niigata Minamata disease patient movement, was a founder of the film "Living on the River Agano" (1992, directed by Makoto Sato). Even now, he continues a "cultural movement" alone called "Souvenirs for the Afterlife." Nearly 30 years after the film's release, even now that many of the cast and people involved have passed away, Mr. Hatano continues to screen the film every spring and calls for memorial gatherings to remember the patients who have died. He also uses every recording medium available to pass on the history of Niigata Minamata disease to future generations, such as by compiling oral histories, erecting Jizo statues, and producing picture books.
Director Haruka Komori, who was influenced by watching "Living on the River Agano" after the earthquake, was drawn to Mr. Hatano and moved to the Agano River basin to continue filming. It captures the forms of support that must change with the times, and the cultural movement that nevertheless never ends. What is true support? It depicts the 50-year journey of a person who stays by others' sides, refusing to let death be a final farewell.
Hideto Hatano and Niigata Minamata Disease
Born in the former Yasuda Town (now Agano City), Niigata Prefecture, Mr. Hatano became a supporter of the Minamata disease patient movement in his 20s. While taking over his family's carpentry business, he worked tirelessly on the administrative appeal movement to save patients who were not certified as having Minamata disease, but those ten years were a series of setbacks. He wanted to face the disease created by humans while conveying the charm of Agano and the people who live there, who have built rich lives in harmony with nature, rather than just a legal struggle. The film "Living on the River Agano" was the realization of Mr. Hatano's wish by Director Sato and others.
When the second lawsuit reached a political settlement in 1995, the expression the patients showed was one of relief, saying, "The trial is finally over." When asked what they wanted to do next, the answers were, "I want to go to a hot spring," or "I want to go to karaoke." Realizing the contradiction in support that had forced them to endure even such small pleasures, Mr. Hatano shifted the style of his movement toward creating "souvenirs for the afterlife" so that they could say, "It was good to be alive, even with Minamata disease."
Director Profile
Haruka Komori
Filmmaker. Born in Shizuoka in 1989. Also active as a member of an art unit with Natsumi Seo (painter/writer) and as a member of NOOK. Since 2011, she has continued to create works based on records of people's stories and landscapes in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, and various parts of the Tohoku region. Currently living in Niigata. Her representative works include "Trace of Breath" (2016), "Listen to the Air" (2018), and "Radio Shimogami-shiro: From the Music of That Town, to Here and Now" (2023). As Haruka Komori + Natsumi Seo, she produced "Under the Waves, On the Earth" in 2014, and "Double Layered Town / Making a Song to Replace Our Places," released in 2019, won the Special Jury Award in the Competition section at the Sheffield DocFest and the Excellence Award for Cultural Documentary Film at the 2021 Agency for Cultural Affairs Film Awards.
[Statement]
Influenced by watching "Living on the River Agano" after the Great East Japan Earthquake, I began attending memorial gatherings in Agano in 2013. Drawn to Mr. Hatano, who had organized these gatherings, I began to point my camera at him. Wanting to know more about the climate of the Agano River basin and how Niigata Minamata disease is spoken of today, I moved to Niigata in 2022 and continued filming. Many of the patients Mr. Hatano supported were never certified as having Minamata disease and were discriminated against within the region. While seeing off people who passed away without being recognized as victims, Mr. Hatano was a person who continued to search for what true support is, so that they could say, "It was good to be alive, even with Minamata disease." He does not stop associating with them even after they pass on to the other world; he does not let death be a farewell.
The name of the memorial gathering, "On the Shores of Aga," is the same title as the first oral history collection Mr. Hatano made using a mimeograph when he first became involved with Niigata Minamata disease. I felt that this phrase, which connects the origin of the cultural movement with the place of mourning that still continues today, represents the 50 years Mr. Hatano has spent staying close to each patient while being rooted in the region. It also felt to me like words of a promise to meet again among those who gathered on the banks of the Agano River, so I borrowed it for the title of the film. Every time spring arrives, people gather in Agano from both this world and the next. This is a film I continued to shoot while holding onto the hope that the reality of memory being passed down exists precisely within this liveliness.