Asian documentary connections, scale-making, and the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF)

Abstract

Intersecting both fields of film festival studies and transnational cinema studies, this article examines how Asian documentary film festivals help to configure and orchestrate regional documentary/film connections. In particular, this work examines Asia’s earliest documentary film festival, the biennial Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF), established in 1989 in Japan, and one of its visionary founders, documentarist Ogawa Shinsuke. This project first traces how YIDFF articulated Ogawa’s ideal of establishing a creative alliance of young generations Asian filmmakers toward the region’s post-Cold War transition. Subsequently, the YIDFF, intertwined with the changing political economy of global and regional film festivals since the 1990s, has taken up Ogawa’s legacy and renewed efforts to generate an Inter-Asian film network. This article leverages Anna Tsing’s conceptualization of global connections to distinguish the YIDFF’s region-making project and rethink the discursive framing of international film festival network. Additionally, it grasps the political significance of the YIDFF’s region-making by explaining how, as an idiosyncratic festival model, it has disturbed and reframed the given configuration of global image consumption and circulation, and has been retained and reinvented through intra-festival connections across Asia.