The Works and Days

World Premiere – Berlinale 2020

Drama (Japanese language)

In a remote Kyoto mountain village, Tayoko mourns her elderly husband’s imminent death while coming to embrace what will be the first real freedom of her life.

‘The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)’ is the follow-up film to ‘The Anchorage’ (2009), which was awarded Locarno Film Festival’s Golden Leopard (Filmmakers of the Present) and was named one of the year’s Top 10 Films by ‘Variety’, ‘IndieWire’, ‘Cinema Scope’ and ‘Film Comment’. ‘The New York Times’ awarded ‘The Anchorage’ Best First Film of the Year.

“The first rule in farming is that you are never to hope for an easy way. The land demands your effort.” ‘The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)’ is an eight-hour fiction shot for a total of twenty-seven weeks, over a period of fourteen months, in a village population forty-seven in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. It is a geographic description of the work and non-work of a farmer. A portrait, over five seasons, of a family, of a terrain, of a soundscape, and of duration itself. It is a film that takes the time to spend time and hear people out. A film-as-adaptive-landscape. A georgic in five books. Featuring a performance by Tayoko Shiojiri that binds fiction and actual bereavement into a heartbreaking indeterminability.

Writer – C.W. Winter,  Directors – C.W. Winter & Anders Edström.