Beyond borders
Japanese director zooms in on those who decide to live outside of their own country, Xing Wen reports.
The director has won over numerous viewers with his realistic style of recording the authenticity in the lives of the relocated protagonists. They are a varied group. They include a 30-something Chinese visual-effects artist who started his English studies in Fiji; a Japanese drummer who sought success on the Chinese music scene; a Chinese farmer from Qiqihar, Heilongjiang province, who went to Fukushima, Japan, to grow vegetables, and a Japanese septuagenarian, who insists on offering free language tutorials at his restaurants in Wuhan, Hubei province.
The documentary, with its signature realistic style and unique perspective, has won a score of 9.3 out of 10 on the review site Douban.
A user of the platform commented: "The interviewees' states of existence and their true emotions are genuinely captured when they are seen handling daily routines. Through watching the documentary, I could easily have a pragmatic look at their situations and then self-reflect on mine."
To document reality in an objective way, Takeuchi doesn't write scripts for filming. He prefers to use shots, scenes and sequences to convey information rather than rely on voice-over.
Sometimes he picks interviewees at random. In one episode, for instance, he sat among dozens of young students in a class at a language school in Japan, to scout for new interviewees.
A middle-aged Chinese man named Liao Ming caught his attention after Liao failed to correctly write down the hiragana alphabet from memory, which seemed easy to the other students.
