> I am compiling a list of personal documentaries or any other films or > videos of an > autobiographical nature > Also - any journals which may have devoted issues to this type of film > and /or > curated seasons, festivals. Dear Harry, This is the mainstream of Japanese documentary since the late 1980s. Much of the personal doc activity of young filmmakers centered around the Pia Film Festival, and also Image Forum and their festival. The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival has shown all the best work, and has also staged numerous, large-scale retrospectives of Japanese documentary that place the personal documentary in its historical context. You will find many articles about it in our bilingual online journal Documentary Box (and some interviews/articles in the early issues that are available only on paper). See especially interviews with Kawaguchi Hajime (#20), Kawase Naomi (#16), Tsuchiya Yutaka (13), Koreeda Hirokazu (13), Oki Hiroyuki (11), Matsumoto Toshio (9), Hara Kazuo (3), and Suzuki Shiroyasu (2). Yamagata also published great catalogs connected to the historical retrospectives with numerous and excellent essays by filmmakers and critics about this phenomenon. I also have an essay in Positions that lays out the historical context in a critical fashion: “The Postwar Documentary Trace: Groping in the Dark,” in Open to the Public: Studies in Japan’s Recent Past, ed. Leslie Pincus, a special issue of Positions 10.1 (Spring 2002): 39-78. The key filmmakers are undoubtedly Hara Kazuo, Suzuki Shiroyasu, and Kawase Naomi. There are too many films to mention, many of them very fine, a few masterful. If you read the materials above, you'll find most of them described. Two of my favorites are Hara's Kyokushiteki eros (Extreme Private Eros) and Kawase's Nitsutsumarete (Embracing). Also Suzuki's Kusa no kage o karu (Harvesting Shadows of Grass). (Google will produce all of this; have fun.) Markus A. M. Nornes Associate Professor, University of Michigan Coordinator, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.ScreenSite.org