Shinsuke Ogawa

The second film in Ogawa Productions’ Narita/Sanrizuka series of documentaries about the resistance by farmers and activists to the construction of the Narita Airport.Read More »

After Summer, Ogawa Pro attempted a more epic scale with Winter in Sanrizuka. It was roundly criticised as a failure. In the wake of this criticism, the collective became increasingly militant. They decided to make a quick and dirty report from the front, calling it a “bullet film.” They shot this agit-prop film in three days, when 2,500 protestors battled 6,500 police. Even the school had been let out so children could participate in the action.Read More »

The third film in Ogawa Productions’ Narita/Sanrizuka series of documentaries about the resistance by farmers and activists to the construction of the Narita Airport.Read More »

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SEA OF YOUTH was Ogawa’s first directorial effort. After leaving Iwanami Productions along with most of his cohort, he struck an unusual path. He gathered young activists together to make an independent documentary on the plight of correspondence students. The film features the group itself as they plot their activism. Many of the onscreen personalities would become core members of Ogawa Productions. The film met only mild success in fundraising, so they completed it by selling off books and blood.Read More »

The seventh and final film in Shinsuke Ogawa’s groundbreaking Sanrizuka Series chronicling the agrarian resistance to the construction of Chiba Prefecture’s Narita International Airport.Read More »

As the protests at Sanrizuka transformed, Ogawa began looking for other subjects. He eventually moved to Yamagata, but considered other subjects like this one: the brutal Kotobukicho district of Yokohama. Only 250 meters on a side, it was home to 6,000 people living in 90 run-down flophouses. This was where day laborers live and die on the streets. Following the method they developed in Sanrizuka, Ogawa’s crew lived with the workers, tenderly filming the trials of their daily lives. It is a touching and heartrending film.Read More »

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After SEA OF YOUTH, the film team turned itself into a full-fledged collective: the Independent Screening Organization, or Jieso for short. This was the precursor to Ogawa Productions, and as the name indicates their focus was on reception. This was because they discovered there was no easy way to show SEA OF YOUTH. Jieso networked social movements and film fans across Japan to create an alternative distribution route. Their next film, FOREST OF OPPRESSION, turns to the phenomenon of students barricading themselves inside schools to various political ends. They chose Takasaki City University of Economics, and audiences were shocked by the vigor and violence of this protest in such a minor university. The film put Ogawa on the map.Read More »

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In 1968, Ogawa decided to form Ogawa Productions and locate it at the newly announced construction site of Narita International Airport in a district called Sanrizuka. Ogawa chose to locate his company in the most radical of the villages, Heta. Some farmers immediately sold their land; others vehemently protested and drew the support of social movements across the country. Together they clashed with riot police sent in to protect surveyors, who were plotting out the airport. Summer in Sanrizuka is a messy film – its chaos communicating the passions and actions on the ground.Read More »

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Sanrizuka – Peasants of the Second Fortress is the fourth in a series of seven films shot between 1968 and 1977 by Ogawa Productions in the fields of Sanrizuka, documenting the ongoing resistance by the farmers and their allies against the construction of a new international airport. Four years into the conflict, the authorities started the coercive expropriation of the farmlands and the violence escalated. This was met by the farmers and fighting students with a renewed sense of resistance, and with the need to organize, unite and protect themselves and the land from the riot police. They erected barricades and set up fortresses, digging underground tunnels to prepare for a long confrontation.Read More »