Toronto Production of Home and Native Lands continued
2022 is over in a blink of an eye, and it's been 2023 years.
I hope that this year will be the year when the world situation settles down and we can take a step further in addressing environmental issues. Happy new year to all of you.
The ongoing documentary film, Home and Native Lands, was shoot in Toronto in June 2022. With this shoot, all the materials have been gathered, and the production is currently in the final stages.
Mr. Stuart Cooper Robinson, who was briefly introduced in Archiving, Home and Native Lands, is a Canadian born and raised in Japan. One of the two main characters in Home and Native Lands, Stuart lived in Japan for three generations from his grandfather, John Cooper Robinson, who was an Anglican missionary. The Robinson family spent their lives with nothing less than an attachment to Japan, and "Home" = "Japan" may have been in their hearts.
Stuart was born in Nagoya in 1921 and spent his childhood there. His boyhood episodes are reflected in the film story based on his autobiography. After that, Stuart studied at the Kobe Canadian Academy where his parents worked until 1939, when Japan's diplomatic relations became dubious due to the Second Sino-Japanese War. Canadian Academy still exists in Kobe. The school, which opened in 1913 as the Canadian Methodist Academy, has always been a cosmopolitan school. In 2021, we interviewed a woman (who lives in the United States) who is an alumni of Stuart's academy, and heard valuable stories such as episodes at school. In 1939, Stuart and his family left war-torn Japan to meet his father, Cuthbert, who had previously returned to Canada with the cost of boarding the ship for five members of his family.
In 2011, Stuart ended his successful life as a father and as a doctor. Documentary films use the expression reenactment when talking about events that happened in the past or people who lived in the past. This is the so-called historical reconstruction method. It is called historical reenactment or reenactment. If the main character cannot tell the story himself, an actor called a reenactor will tell the story for him. Of course, in the case of a documentary film, the story is constructed based on the truth, so the story is assembled based on various materials, and a script (although it is slightly different from a narrative film) is created. Historical materials, handwritten diaries and letters, photographs, interviews with family members, and many other materials are collected and carefully examined to compose a story. We will also prepare the necessary props for the reproduction shoot. There is a limit to the materials we can borrow from my family, so sometimes the production will prepare them.
The production, which was still carried out using COVID safety measures, was filmed with the minimum number of staff and within the set time. In two days, we finished recording all of Stuart's (actor) life history, and we are going into full-scale editing from around the fall of 2022. After the rough cut and fine cut, until the final cut after this, archive organization and post-production work will continue.
Translated from the original text on NOTE.
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