All posts tagged: people-centric

Eye-One-The-Last-Persimmon

The Lasting Persimmon

Risaki is coming back home to her wintery countryside, Yamagata which is 400 km away from Tokyo. There she finds the seemingly unchanging snowy life of her beloved family and home village—snow shoveling, making pickles, bridges over a big river covered with snow, and persimmon fruits left unharvested on its tree. The original Japanese title of Chikaura Kei’s 2016 short movie is Nagori-Gaki which is a type of Japanese persimmon that become very ripe and sweet when left unharvested to endure the brutal winter. This is a custom in northern areas of Japan in order for travelers and birds to have something to eat. “Warm, Gentle and Strong” is how Chikaura described the people from the region and their customs that inspired The Lasting Persimmon. Homepage at: http://persimmonfilms.com

Toshiyuki Hasegawa: Mixing Business With Pleasure

Hasegawa Toshiyuki means business. In the sense of being completely earnest in what he says or does, the description is certainly appropriate. However, sitting in a small cafe in Shimbashi where the first floor of a Bauhaus-esque office building has been converted into a shoutengai (a shop area) full of cozy eateries and pubs, and listening to him talk about goals he aspires to achieve, one can also perceive a penchant for seeing how connections between people can lead to opportunities. With regard to the vast landscape of the international film industry, his “people-centric” brand of business savvy is a welcome breeze in the otherwise stuffy confines of Japan’s all too self-congratulatory, sales-figures and awards fixated film industry. A graduate of Nihon University’s College of Art where he studied broadcasting, Hasegawa’s love of movies was born at an early age. One would imagine the titles which captured his interest during those formative years were more children’s fare like the Pippy Longstocking series, or Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Ballon, but this certainly wasn’t the case for …