Magino Village: A Tale

Director: Shinsuke Ogawa

1986 / 222min / 16mm

A monumental meditation on Japanese history as it persists in the life of the country’s endangered rural villages, the sui generis Magino Village—named for the hamlet where Ogawa Pro began living and working together in 1974—places scenes belonging to the educational film and observational documentary traditions alongside fiction passages featuring “pink film” star Junko Miyashita. The fruits of more than a decade of embedded experience and painstaking creative labor would be an epic of the land, the people who work it, their myths and stories, and their long history of dissidence in the face of state violence.