Japan will probably be seeing many more, but "Mujo Sobyo" beats all others as the first documentary on the aftermath of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and tsunami. A 75-minute film shot and made in 50 days and now playing at the Auditorium Shibuya theater in Tokyo (with screenings in Osaka and Nagoya to follow), "Mujo Sobyo (The Sketch of Mujo)" is as simple and unpretentious as its title.
Director Koichi Omiya says that he had wanted to complete and deliver the film as soon as possible. "In a way, I was driven by a need to keep the memory of the disaster intact," he says. "Which is strange, because the landscape is so devastated you'd think the visual memory would haunt the mind forever. On the other hand, there was a part of me that thought, or rather knew, that unless I got everything down on film, it would get distorted, or huge chunks of memory would fade away."
The 53-year-old filmmaker ("Tadaima: Sorezore no Ibasho," "September, 11"), who was born in Kuji in Tohoku's Iwate Prefecture and spent his childhood moving around in Iwate and Yamagata prefectures, says that this disaster struck him with particular force, partly because the northeast is the land of his birth and largely because his parents still live there.