Carte Blanche Session: Radical Film Network

The Museo Reina Sofía extends a carte-blanche invitation to members of the Radical Film Network, made up of historians and theorists from political and independent cinema, to put together a film programme of their choice in the Museo. In response, those in the network have selected fragments of films from the Sanrizuka documentary series made by Ogawa Productions, a seminal, non-fictional film collective from Japan that was founded in 1968 by film-maker Shinsuke Ogawa (1935–1992), a pre-eminent figure in Japanese cinema. With a commitment to independent, collective and political film-making, the group filmed the first political and social upheavals in Japan, for instance the student protests and the Sanrizuka agricultural community’s struggles, which form the nucleus of this session.

From 1968 to 1977, the writer and film-maker Fukuda Katsuhiko (1943–1998) and Ogawa Productions documented the Sanrizuka farmers’ and their allies’ resistance movement as they protested about the destruction of their villages and land caused by the construction of Narita International Airport, the main aerial gateway to Japan and a project imposed by the government at the time. The struggle extended across a number of decades and, therefore, was one of the biggest social opposition movements in Japan, one that still echoes today and reverberates through other contemporary land defence struggles and movements. During this process, members of Ogawa Productions lived in the region of Sanrizuka, in the town of Heta, situated at the heart of the conflict, and would make seven films, all told, about the conflict, documenting core aspects of the farmers’ lives. 

This presentation focuses on the audiovisual collection of Narita International Airport and the archives of the Community Historical Museum, which conserve the memory of decades-long land struggles against the construction of this infrastructure. The screenings are complemented by a conversation with researcher Aikawa Yoichi and the film programmer Ricardo Matos Cabo on the history and potential use of these images.