CURRENTS

THE WORKS AND DAYS (OF TAYOKO SHIOJIRI IN THE SHIOTANI BASIN)

C.W. WINTER AND ANDERS EDSTRÖM

ELEVEN YEARS AFTER their modest, award-winning feature debut , C.W. Winter and Anders Edström return with an opus several times more ambitious. In , the two filmmakers depict the life of a farmer and his family in a remote valley in Japan’s Kyoto Prefecture. Shot over a period of 14 months, the film adopts the form of an eight-hour workday, complete with three intermissions (one 45-minute break, bookended by a pair of 15-minute interludes) meant to replicate a typical schedule. But where such daunting length might suggest something tedious or one-note, is constantly shape-shifting, mixing ravishing landscape imagery and scenes of day-to-day labor with bustling dinner sequences and moments of alcohol-fueled speaks to the power, beauty, and necessity of the theatrical experience.—