This festival was launched for documentary creators to express what they cannot fully convey through existing media. A screen was set up in a neighborhood izakaya, with creators, performers and audience members all rubbing shoulders and generating thinking and action for the society of the future.
Over the last two years during the long-drawn out pandemic, division and intolerance has spread. DOCU MEMENTO organizers wanted to create an opportunity for each of us to restore tolerance by resisting these global trends, and presenting diverse ways of life, choices, and ways of thinking through the medium of the documentary. This edition of the festival provided a platform for the voices of diverse guests including Kyochi Watanabe, who uses music to try and prevent people taking their own lives in Aokigahara Forest, known as Suicide Forest; Gushiken Takamatsu, who recovers the remains of Okinawa’s war dead; Mayumi Tsuchiya and Ayano Kanzaki, who question the social requirement for women to be “feminine”; the Kurds speaking up on the issue of the Higashi Nihon Immigration Center, and reports on those resisting authority in Myanmar and Afghanistan.