18th DMZ International Documentary Film Festival2026.9.10—16

Storytellers

Japan2013120minDCPColor12

#Nature·Ecosystem #Environment #History #Friendship·Love

SYNOPSIS

The third installment of Sakai Ko and Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Tohoku trilogy explores how the experiences of the Great East Japan Earthquake can be passed on to future generations. Continuing ideas introduced in The Sound of Waves and Voices from the Waves, the film turns to the region’s folk storytelling tradition. At Mount Kurikoma in Miyagi Prefecture, three storytellers share fantastical tales as folklorist Ono Kazuko guides their conversations.

REVIEW

If the previous three documentaries rebuilt a territory of continuing life by passing through memories of the Great East Japan Earthquake in survivors’ testimonies, Storytellers turns to the oral tradition of Tohoku folktales to show how stories themselves create community. Seventy-eight-year-old Ono Kazuko has spent some forty years collecting tales handed down in villages across the region. She sits with three storytellers and listens as they recount them. Now elderly, these narrators first heard the stories from their parents or grandparents; today, those tales pass through their own voices to another generation.
A folk tradition—and a community of storytelling—can survive only when a listener eventually becomes a speaker. This structure closely echoes the method Hamaguchi and Sakai developed across the preceding films. In this sense, the Tohoku Trilogy borrows the ancient form of oral transmission to reveal the potential destination of the stories left by survivors of the disaster. As one storyteller, Sasaki Ken, says, if someone is there in front of us to listen, we are not alone. It is a message of hope that resonates equally with the people of Tohoku.
In the final scene, listeners gather around the storytellers. Their animated faces, delighted by the tales, somehow resemble the steady expressions of survivors in the earlier films as they spoke of the future still to come.

DIRECTOR'S NOTE

DIRECTOR

HAMAGUCHI Ryusuke

Born in Kanagawa, Japan, in 1978, Hamaguchi Ryusuke made his graduation film, Passion (2008) at Tokyo University of the Arts. In 2021, Drive My Car won the Best Screenplay Award and three independent prizes, including the FIPRESCI Prize, at the Cannes Film Festival. The following year, it received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, and won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

SAKAI Ko

Born in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, in 1979, Sakai Ko began making films while studying at Tokyo University of Agriculture. His thesis film was Creep (2007), followed by works including Home Sweet Home (2006). After making the Tohoku Trilogy with Hamaguchi Ryusuke, he has continued to document folktales passed down in Miyagi Prefecture, while also participating in local video archiving projects.