DIRECTOR/SCREENPLAY/PHOTOGRAPHY: Ulrike Ottinger
PRODUCERS: Heino Deckert, Ulrike Ottinger 
PRODUCTION CO: Idéale Audience, Zero One Film
EDITOR: Annette Fleming
WITH: Fujima Takamasa (Kabuki actor), Fujima Kiyotsugu  (Kabuki actor), Eva Mattes (Narrator)

FESTIVALS: Berlin

REVIEW

“In the Echigo region of northwestern Japan, where heavy snow blankets entire landscapes and villages for more than half the year, a distinctive way of life has evolved. Time follows a different, slower rhythm, and everyday routines, along with religious rituals, wedding traditions, festivals, foods, songs, and games, are adapted to Echigo’s austere living conditions and natural beauty. Ulrike Ottinger’s latest film leads us into this mythical country, turning her lens on daily and communal life under the snowy mountains… Stunning documentary sequences merge with the tale of students Takeo and Mako, played by Kabuki performers. Their journey through the past and repeated encounters with the present find them wondrously transformed with help from a beautiful vixen fox. Under Snow is clear evidence that Ottinger, whose career spans more than four decades, remains one of world cinema’s most original artists” 

– Women Make Movies

“Instead of adopting a Western perspective toward Eastern ritual, Ottinger looks closely at how young people in Japan… today make sense of older traditions, using them for their own purposes and contextualizing them within their modern lives.

Under Snow… uses a dramatization of Suzuki Bokushi’s Snow Country Tales as a fictional framework for examining the contemporary practices of people living in Echigo, Japan. We see women making decorative crêpe paper, a wedding ritual, and other local activities, as if we were following the sojourn of the two student travellers, Takeo and Mako, from Suzuki’s text. In this manner, Ottinger not only displays the significance of kabuki performance for Echigo cultural life, but also underscores the performative character of all ethnographic gestures. What’s more, the film is overlaid with an explanatory narrative voice that, in this context, melds the documentary 'voice of God' with the benshi of Japanese cinematic history.”

— Michael Sicinski, Cinema-scope

Ulrike Ottinger in Asia – an interview with Goethe Film Series curator Jutta Brendemühl

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS*

New Plymouth
Wednesday, 3 August, 6.00pm

Auckland     
Monday, 22 August, 6:15pm

Wellington     
Monday, 29 August, 6:15pm

Palmerston North
Wednesday, 7 September, 6pm

Hamilton     
Monday, 19 September, 7.30pm

Dunedin
Wednesday, 28 September, 7.30pm

Canterbury
Monday, 10 October, 7.00pm

Whanganui     
Monday, 17 October, 7:00pm

​*Non-members welcome by donation (notes only please)​
See more GERMAN CINEMA >>
German Cinema selection presented in
co-operation with the Goethe-Institut