OYSTER FACTORY

Once there were twenty or more. Now, in the Japanese coastal village of Ushimado, there are only six. The gradual disappearance of small, family-run oyster factories may be a sign of the times, but it is more than a symbolic change: it also has very real consequences for fishermen, manual labourers and local residents, who are not happy to see workers being brought in from outside. Using more than ninety hours of material recorded over three weeks, New York-based filmmaker and activist writer Kazuhiro Soda documents the often rough daily life of the village in a documentary that, under a calm and contemplative veneer, makes deep and terrible observations about the often tragic state in which runaway globalization leaves workers. Presented at the Locarno Festival, Oyster Factory succeeds brilliantly in shifting from the micro-scale to the macro-scale by showing, through shared actions and lives, the deep anxieties and doubts afflicting Japan. It is a society still caught between tradition and modernity — between the desire for progress and the fear of change, between an idealized past and an uncertain future.

PRESENTED EN COLLABORATION WITH RIDM