-1287: Directed and
filmed by Ian Thomas Ash. Running Time: 70 minutes.
Rating: 4/4
Each of us needs to face our
death. Not that we ever want to. No one likes to think about death, especially
their own. It is, in every sense, the
ultimate reminder of the impermanence of life and the world around us. And yet, since we all must die eventually, we
have no choice but to face it, sooner or later.
For Katsuko, this time came when her
doctor informed her that her cancer had returned. She was first diagnosed years earlier, but an
operation seemed to have removed it well enough that she hadn’t expected it to
come back. Sadly, this turned out to not
be the case. The title of this
documentary about her final years, -1287,
refers to the 1,287 days that passed between the re-diagnosis of her doctor and
the day of her final departure.
This was not a planned film on the
part of the director, Ian Thomas Ash (who won the Nippon Visions award two
years ago with his previous film, A2-B-C). As he explained to us in a Q&A session
after the screening, he had known and been good friends with Katsuko for some
years prior to this, ever since she had become one of his English
students. After she informed him that
she was once again sick and would definitely die within a few years, he began
to film her intermittently and do some small “interviews” with her, but at
first he only intended for these recordings to be for his own personal
recollections. It was only later on that
the possibility of a film about her began to take shape in his mind.
It is at least partially because of
this that -1287 does not at all resemble
or match most people’s expectations of what a typical biographical documentary
should look like. There is no structured
or detailed run-through of Katsuko’s childhood, of the highs and lows of her
marriage, of what sort of work or adventures she had (or wanted to have), or of
what her children did and are doing now- in fact, with the brief exception of
her doctor, no one else in her life, family, friend, or otherwise, is seen or
heard from. She talks occasionally about
things she regretted, or that made her happy, but it’s just pieces. What we get instead are a series of moments,
most of them clustered within the last 6 months of her life. Nothing more, nothing less, just moments of a
person at the end of her road in this particular life.
This is, of course, a direct result
of how the footage in the film came into being- not through the intent of
creating a narrative or capturing a particular message, but simply through the
desire of the director to claim a few, small moments of a dear friend’s life
for memory’s sake. He certainly could
have tried to retroactively interview friends and family, or do his own narrations
about what he knew of Katsuko’s earlier life.
Doing so could certainly have told the audience more facts about the
women they see on-screen, but it would have drawn away from the real focus of
the film, which is simply to present Katsuko as she was, and not some
all-encompassing picture of her. It
would have standardized what is, in the end, a very powerful example of
intensely personal filmmaking.
The straightforward presentation of
these moments leading to Katsuko’s death is broken only at the very end, right
before we see her body after her passing. We jump back to one of the first conversations
Ian had with her, one where she admitted her unhappiness in her marriage, and
her occasional regrets at not having had the chance to leave her husband after
her children’s births to find someone she could have truly been in love with. She is not bitter, or angry, or resentful, or
sad, merely thoughtful and direct. When
Ian is finished with his questions, she comments on how good it felt to be
openly honest about such personal matters for once. And then says, and here I am translating very
roughly from memory, “That’s all over now.”
She’s clearly referring to that day’s filming session, but by taking
this single scene out of the timeline and placing it at the end, Ian has given
it a quiet symbolism of its own- it’s as if Katsuko is looking back and
commenting on the entirety of her life, at peace with the fact that it is soon
going to end. In the next scene, she is
dead, and lying in state.
As powerful and moving as it is,
this is not necessarily a film for everyone.
Its atypical structure and the occasionally wandering nature of the
conversations shown may bore or frustrate some accustomed to only seeing films
or documentaries with “points” to be made.
And the topic of death, especially the slow, wasting kind of a sick family
member, is a subject too sensitive for some to see so directly and without
embellishment. But those who can open
themselves to the film, and to the small, tucked-away nuggets of wisdom to be
found in what Katsuko has to say, will walk away with a lot to think about and
wonder at. I know that was certainly the
case at my screening. This movie went on
to win the Nippon Visions Audience Award, one of two awards decided by audience
ratings, and when it was announced I was not in the least bit surprised. -1287
is a wonderful piece of documentary filmmaking, beautiful in the singularity of
its subject and its purpose, and was one of the best films I had the pleasure
of seeing at Nippon 2015.
-Noah
Franc
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