Educational Media Reviews Online

This film by Naomi Mizoguchi has a good spirit and seeks to convey a broad understanding of Ainu life. She began learning about the Ainu people in 2008 and later started to make recordings in 2015. This collection of recordings is where the heart of the film lies, but also in what makes this approach flawed. She focuses almost exclusively on sharing the stories of four elders in the community. Indeed, the subtitle of the film provided on the Good Docs site is an accurate summation “The life stories of Ainu elders and their efforts to keep their culture alive.” Her filming admirably gives the elders space to share their stories and detail their approaches to saving Ainu culture. Examples would be canoe building, language, cloth making, and millet growing. The film also tries to group topics discussed by the elders into four different seasons. This device doesn’t work very well, since there isn’t a broader discussion on how the seasons impact Ainu life.

The difficulty with this approach of pulling together recordings is some topics are covered nicely, such as cloth making, whereas other topics don’t go into enough detail or follow a story that doesn’t inform the audience about Ainu culture. There is a need to have some background about Ainu history, such as how the Ainu were impacted by the Imperial Stock Farm construction as well as more context to some of the beliefs shared during the film. While we hear the stories of the elders, we don’t get the sense of Ainu society as a whole and there isn’t much context regarding the Ainu community and their relation to Japan. The section on canoe making starts fine but loses its instructive value as it follows the debate on if the canoes should be launched since the weather was bad.

This film would need some framework for use in a classroom and should be paired with background reading about the Ainu. Perhaps it would be useful to show how the Ainu are preserving their culture in comparison to other indigenous groups worldwide. There might also be a few small clips that could be used to discuss elements of their culture. The voices of the elders are important, and it is laudable the filmmaker captured them, but for a class with little background on the Ainu more context is needed.

Awards:
Prisma Rome Independent Film Awards

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