puujee
Canadian Premiere 
Documentary | Japan | 2006 | 110 minutes
Director: Kazuya Yamada
Producer: Chikae Honjo
Language: Japanese, Mongolian + English subtitles
Produced by The PUUJEE Production Committee
This is the story of Puujee, a little nomad girl in the age of globalization.
Synopsis
Our lives are transformed, becoming more profound and diverse, through our encounters with others. Japanese explorer Yoshiharu Sekino is on a voyage to trace the journey of the human race back to its point of origin. The documentary begins in the fall of 1999, just as Sekino reaches Mongolia. He runs into Puujee on horseback. He tried to photograph her, but she told him no. “If you’re here to take photos, stay away!” This was how their friendship began. The film then follows the next five years as Sekino goes away and comes back repeatedly to visit Puujee and her family, witnessing changes with each return.
Puujee is the captivating figure at the center of the film. Her destiny is tied to the hundreds of thousands of agrarian Mongolians who have moved to cities to escape deprivation and the deleterious effects of the new market economy. In the film, Puujee, a rare independent spirit, shares her dreams of her future life and frustration in the reality.
Director Kazuya Yamada renders these lives with a disarming simplicity but an equally deceptive sensitivity for arranging images that demonstrate the delicacy and graciousness of a vanishing way of life. Abounding with human dignity, the film puujee is an understated masterwork of beauty and humanism.
Selected Awards
2008 Jury Award of Best Documentary 2008 Sundance Film Festival
Green Cross Special Mention Award, Cinemambiente International Environmental Film Festival
Jury Award & Audience Award, Green Film Festival in Seoul
2007 Grand Prix EBS International Documentary Festival
Earth Vision, the 15th Tokyo Global Environmental Film Festival
The Filmmaker
KAZUYA YAMADA (Director)
Born in Kochi Prefecture in 1954, Kazuya Yamada graduated from the Tokyo University of Agriculture in 1976. Afterwards, he enrolled in the Art Department of Temple University (Philadelphia campus) but left without finishing his course of study in radio, television and film. He worked as a TV program director for Tak Inagaki Productions in New York, as a contract director for Nippon Television Network, and later went freelance. In 1996 he started a career as a film director along side that of a TV program director. He is a member of the Directors Guild of Japan.
About Yoshiharu Sekino (Explorer)
The human race emerged from Africa, crossed Eurasia, and eventually spread throughout North and then South America. Yoshiharu Sekino is a Japanese explorer, travel writer and photographer, anthropologist, and doctor.
Sekino was born in Tokyo. In 1971, while still a student at Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo), he cofounded and participated in a university team that descended the entire length of the Amazon, thereafter travelling around south America. He graduated (in law) from Hitotsubashi in 1975, and (in medicine) from Yokohama City University in 1982.
Sekino has worked as a doctor in hospitals in western suburban Tokyo, but is better known for his travels in Peru and elsewhere in south America; as well as in Africa, where his explorations into the origins of mankind were made into a television series, Gurēto jānī (グレートジャーニー, i.e. “Great Journey”), broadcast on Fuji Television and later available on a set of DVDs.Since 2002 Sekino has been a professor of cultural anthropology at Musashino Art University. Starting in 1974, Sekino has published a stream of books about south America, anthropology, exploration, prehistoric demography, and more; some of which are primarily photographic.
Director Kazuya Yamada and his wife, producer Chikae Honjo will be attending the screening.
