Tatsuya Mori

Tatsuya Mori, Japanese documentary filmmaker, TV director and author, Yamagata Documentary Festival award winner (A2).

Author of A, 1998 and A2, 2001, two documentary movies about everyday life of Aum Shinrikyo followers. Aum Shinrikyo is a controversial Japanese religious group, whose doctrine is based on primitive Buddhism, primitive Yoga, esoteric Buddhism and supernaturalness, most known for involvement in a series of incidents including the Tokyo subway gas attack. One of the films, A, was showed at a Berlin Documentary Film Festival, but the movies did not screen in Japan theatrically, were not broadcast on television and were not accessible for rent although available for purchase.

A particular scene from A, where a plainclothes policeman attacks an Aum follower who is immediately arrested for attacking the actual attacker (Mori was filming from a distance) caused specifically controversial reactions among the audience watching the film. The footage was later introduced in court and the 'Aum attacker' was acquitted as a result. Filmmaker Mori was accused of staging the improbable incidents and using actors nevertheless. Some even refused to believe the footage was shot inside the Aum facilities. [1]

When A2, Mori's second controversial movie was completed, the filmmaker declared his unwillingness to return to the Aum theme in the future. By his own admission, the efforts invested in production of the two documentaries did not bring him anything more than financial damages and troubles, due to limited scale of theatrical screening and refusal of TV broadcasting corporations to licence the films (Mori refused to allow isolated scenes to be used in video sets to Aum-related news broadcasts).

Mori is, while his documentaries of Aum Shinrikyo were very controversial when they were being filmed and shown, today considered as amongst the Japan’s most talented independent non-fiction filmmakers.

References

External links

* [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?ff20020327a1.htm Japan Times: "You just need to ask"] - on films by Tatsuya Mori. Registration required (free).
* [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EWBKXK A]
* [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FMGTT4 A2]
* [http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/a.shtml Midnight Eye: A] . A review.