Documentary Educational Resources - Filmmaker / Plath, David / All Films

So Long Asleep

Tue, 9 Oct 2018 15:11:00 GMT

Thanks to books and films such as Unbroken and Bridge Over the River Kwai many Americans know that Imperial Japan forced Allied military prisoners to perform heavy labor during the Asia-Pacific War. Few also know that hordes of Asian civilian men suffered the same treatment.For seven decades the governments of Japan and Korea have sparred over who is responsible for the dead souls of Empire's children.

A chance encounter between a Japanese Buddhist priest and a Korean graduate student sparked a bi-national people-power project that for 20 years has been locating and retrieving the remains of Korean laborers who died in Hokkaido, Japan's large northern island. On the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, project volunteers carried 115 sets of remains on a controversial pilgrimage through Japan's major cities en route to a contested reburial in Seoul's Municipal Cemetery.

So Long Asleep takes us to visit the excavation sites, and then we travel with the volunteers on their pilgrimage.Project co-leader Yoshihiko Tonohira, chief priest of a rural temple in western Hokkaido, was born after the war; he learned only years later that there were Korean laborers buried in his region. He began to locate them, cremate them, and provide memorial services for them.

Co-leader Byung-Ho Chung was in Japan doing fieldwork for his doctoral dissertation when he happened to visit Tonohira's temple and learned of the excavations. He promised to return with a crew of Korean students and anthropologists trained to excavate while preserving evidence of causes of death.Together they launched a series of workshops that stand on a hurtful past to build a hopeful future. Volunteers, most of them students, come to Hokkaido for a fortnight: Japanese, Koreans, zainichi offspring of Korean migrants in Japan, plus others from elsewhere.

During the day, supervised by forensic anthropologists, they clear away foliage and dig for remains. At night they meet to build a community of mutual respect that can stay the new waves of ethnic and nationalist rancor washing across East Asia. Participants speak of the life-changing power of witnessing with others the evidence of historic hatred.

So Long Asleep is an uplifting report on what engaged citizens can accomplish when their governments drift away from attending to duty.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Award of Merit, Impact Docs, 2018

Bronze Award, Spotlight Documentary Film Awards, 2017

Margaret Mead Film Festival, 2017

Cinema Soup Film Festival, 2018

Ogeechee International History Film Festival, 2018

MayDay Film Festival, 2018

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Candles for New Years

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

Candles for New Years
Buy Now: $295.00

For 200 years, groups of Lahu have been migrating from southwestern China into the highlands of Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle" region. Though they share much with other migrants in the ethnic patchwork of the region, the Lahu maintain a vigorous sense of themselves as a distinct people. New Years is their prime time for celebrating what it means to be Lahu. Candles For New Years is the first visual portrait of Lahu life prepared for English-speaking viewers. Anthropologist Jacquetta Hill has followed for more than a decade the fate of a group of Lahu who cleared the forest and built a community north of Chiang Mai, Thailand. In this film, she describes the Lahu New Year as celebrated by the community: the elaborate preparations to appease the spirits they rely upon to bring them good fortune, the dancing & feasting and the mingling with friends and relatives from sister villages.

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Fit Surroundings

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Fit Surroundings
Buy Now: $295.00

Based on more than a decade of field research, this colorful report on the high-touch craft of shellfish diving, takes us to the coast of the Shima Peninsula in central Japan. Here most of the divers (ama) are women and many of them are older with an average age of 50. By taking you into different settings where the divers operate, the program allows you to sample a social environment in which fierce individual competition underwater is checked and balanced by a spirited colleagueship carefully nurtured among groups of divers as they relax on shore. The program is suitable for use at the secondary school level and above, for courses not only about Japan, but about gender, aging, and sustainable environments, or "fit surroundings." A study guide which includes additional information and suggested readings is available below.

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