THE WITCHES OF THE ORIENT
plus exclusive Q&A with the director, Julien Faraut and Tara Brady, The Irish Times
Director: Julien Faraut
100 minutes. France. 2021. Languages: Japanese. Subtitled. Colour. Documentary
In present day Kyoto we join former players of the Nichibo Kaizuka textile factory female Volleyball team at a lunch reunion. The team, the ‘Typhoon from the Orient’ created in November 1953, become known as the ‘Witches of the Orient’. Training six days a week and 51 weeks per year, through dedication, discipline, and a harsh training regime, they were driven by their coach Daimatsu – known in Japan as ‘Daimatsu-The demon’ – to win at any cost. They became the best female volleyball team in the world, with an uninterrupted run to 258 victories up until 1966. A record which still remains to be beaten!
To a backdrop of electronic/pop music (some of the original score composed by American musician Jason Lytle), Faraut’s documentary plays tricks on us, spinning the image like the players lunging to keep the ball in play at any cost. Having worked with the French Sports Institute (INSEP) for 15 years, Faraut gained access to a large and mostly unseen collection of 16mm archival footage. Once more through the medium of film, Faraut bridges the connections between sport, cinema and art. interpolating stunning archive footage of training sessions and factory work with, slow-motion ellipses, flickering polarised and b/w images, negative invertions, and Japanese comics visuals, and manga-style fiction.
