We present the documentaries that will compete at the International Competition of the YAMAGATA International Documentary Film Festival which will take place from October 5 – 12, 2023 in Yamagata, Japan.

International Competition

A university student in India writes letters to her estranged lover while he is away. Through these letters, we get a glimpse into the drastic changes taking place around her. Merging reality with fiction, dreams, memories, fantasies and anxieties, an amorphous narrative unfolds. (MUBI)

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A funeral car cruises the streets of Medellin, while a young director tells the story of his past in this violent and conservative city. He remembers the pre-production of his first film, a Class-B movie with ghosts. (MUBI)

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Based on rare archives, the exemplary adventure of Somankidi Coura – an agricultural cooperative founded in Mali in 1977 by West African immigrant workers living in workers’ accommodation in France – sheds light on the violence of colonial agriculture and the ecological challenges in Africa today. (MUBI)

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On February 24 2022, Yevhen and his friends, volunteered to join the first aid battalion on the front line. They provided life-saving support and evacuation of the injured. This film reveals the experiences of these young men over six months full of drama, despair, fear, hatred, bitterness and love. (MUBI)

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Somewhere on the internet is a land where communities pretend to live out a survivalist fiction. The “players” reveal their fears and fantasies, in an at times unsettling blurring of the real and the virtual. The avatars of the directors of Knit’s Island spent 963 hours there. (MUBI)

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A film which portrays the radical transformation of the territory of Araucanía at the end of the 19th through the eyes of a young foreigner, Gustave Verniory. The film draws a sensitive cinematic space, playing with and creating a dialogue between past and contemporary. It is a path that meanders between human and geographic landscapes, in order to reveal the deep essence of the Araucanía territory. (Marché Du Film)

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In 2020, the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 swept the globe with panic and death, keeping the whole world hostage in fear and isolation. 220 kilometers from Wuhan, China, villagers in 47KM lived through the turmoil guided by ancestral prophecies and lifestyle, continuing their ordinary existence in those extraordinary times.

Iraqi-French filmmaker Abbas Fahdel, whose Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) (NYFF53) captured everyday experiences of his homeland’s citizens in the years before and after the U.S. (MUBI)

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Bathed in the half-light, a bus station north of Cordoba in Argentina. Waiting, and the arrivals and departures of the local buses punctuate the lives of these workers and travellers. Far from making an observational documentary, Gustavo Fontán crafts the ghostly portrait of a place of transit where the traces of those who bring it alive resonate and are muffled, blending mystery with everyday life. Attentive to the light that shifts across the people waiting, the very thing that gives rhythm to this transitory space, the director establishes a fragile relationship between the visible and the invisible, presence and absence. Like a kaleidoscope, the camera offers fragmented shots of the station featuring blurred silhouettes reflected in the windows of ticket offices and buses, portals to a world off-screen. Like a prism recomposing light, the film seems to fix the permanence of transience. The camera captures the elusive expressions on the faces it glimpses, whilst audio-wise, snatches of voices evoke loss, past loves and wounds. The voices, melancholic counterpoints to these sepulchral images, act as convergence lines in a film that emerges as a multi-dimensional play of mirrors. Although La Terminal opens with the purchase of a wristwatch that a woman sets as she puts it on, time seems to stand still in this blueish obscurity. “Perhaps the exact date is to be found under the word ‘ghost’” (Alejandra Pizarnik).

Rosa and her friends have decided to spend the night on “the island”, a stretch of beach that has become their realm. It’s the last night of the summer, they’re turning eighteen, experiencing everything, and saying their goodbyes. (MUBI)

Prosthetics, leather gloves, and distressed jeans are all produced in factories, but in each case the relationship between product, producer and customer is dramatically different. (MUBI)

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Little is known about the mysterious figure of Isabel Santaló, an old artist, today fallen into oblivion. But occasionally some visitors come to her flat. Through them and the voice of Antonio López (Dream of Light,Víctor Erice), the only painter who remembers her, we shape a multifaceted film. (MUBI)

The portrait of a Carpathian village: In encounters with three independent women, Maksym Melnyk documents rural life in the Ukrainian village of Stuzhytsya near the EU border. (MUBI)

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Trinh Minh-ha returns to material shot in rural China in the early 1990s in an essayistic reflection on the rich and complex history of the country – and of the mediums of film, text and voice. (MUBI)

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For more information, please visit: https://www.yidff.jp/index.html.en