Noticias

S. Louisa Wei is a documentary filmmaker and a member of Hong Kong Director’s Guild since 2018. She is also an award-winning writer and an Associate Professor teaching film related courses in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. Wei has four documentary features to date: Storm Under the Sun, Golden Gate Girls (2014), Havana Divas (2019), and A Life in Six Chapters (2022). She also made three TV documentaries, Writing 10000 Miles, Wang Shiwei: The Buried Writer (2017), and Cui Jian: Rocking China. Among her works, “Golden Gate Girl” portrays the life and times of Esther Eng, once honored “South China’s first woman director.” The documentary has received positive reviews and attention from The Hollywood Reporter, Voice of America, South China Morning Post, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. “Havana Divas” is a sister work covering the Chinese immigrants’ life and the traveling Cantonese Opera in the Chinatowns of North and Latin America.

The documentary entails an interesting story regarding its release, since it was initially shot by Shinsuke Ogawa in the 1980s, in an effort to depict the lives of the people in the tiny Japanese village of Kaminoyama, who deal with the cultivation of persimmons. However, the film was concluded in the 21st century by his disciple, Xiaolian Peng, who stayed very close to his teacher’s style, even revisiting the same locations after 15 years, to the point that the change in helm is not visible at all.

Ogawa takes a very thorough, but at the same time very sensitive look at the growing, drying, peeling and packaging of the persimmons in the area, focusing on the agricultural, as much as on the humanistic aspect. In the latter fashion, a number of people dealing with the different stages of the cultivation are interviewed, talking about the perfect combination of earth,...