OYSTER FACTORY
(牡蠣工場)
2014. 150 mins.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17 - 7PM with Kazuhiro Soda and producer Kiyoko Kashiwagi in-person for Q&A.

(This event is $10.)

This is a part of the complete retrospective RADICAL OBSERVATION: THE FILMS OF KAZUHIRO SODA. Full series information here: spectacletheater.com/kazuhiro-soda

Like INLAND SEA, this film grew out of summer vacations spent by Soda and Kashiwagi in the village of Ushimado, in Japan’s Okayama prefecture - the fishing town of 7,500 where Kashiwagi’s mother grew up. After being invited by a fisherman named Hirano to film his oyster factory, Soda and Kashiwagi ended up accumulating over 90 hours of material in three weeks. The result is one of the filmmaker’s most sweeping works, complete with a 20-minute opening sequence in which nary a word is uttered onscreen. The extracting, shelling and scooping out of many varieties of shellfish become indelible soundscapes unto themselves, and the filmmakers’ careful attention to the given moment anticipates the stream-of-consciousness narrative of INLAND SEA. OYSTER FACTORY in particular bears out Soda’s sixth “commandment” of filmmaking, to cover small areas deeply. In time, conversations with incoming oyster factory manager and owner Watanabe (whose own business closer to Tokyo has been displaced by the Fukushima meltdown) and his employees take the lid off the the fishing industry’s wariness towards newly hired workers from China. The result is a hypnotic (and at times nailbiting) survey of heavy industry, plus all the raw humanity that entails: increasingly embattled in getting his footage, Soda captures remarkable glimpses of camaraderie and xenophobia, to say nothing of the compact between these fishermen and the Seto Islands Inland Sea that stretches back at least a few centuries.

“Superb.” - Charles Mudede, The Stranger

“All’s well that ends well? The film offers no such pat arc. Instead it digresses freely, tracking the adventures of a white stray cat Soda and his wife adopt and following the rescue of a fisherman who falls off a dock…. (OYSTER FACTORY) is warm, insightful and human.” - Japan Times