The Works and Days (2020)
C.W. Winter and Anders Edström,
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), 2020, 2.5K video, color, sound, 480 minutes.
WRITTEN CIRCA 700 BC, the Greek poet Hesiod’s
Works and Days is an 828-line poem that doubles as a sort of farmers’ almanac in which the author instructs his brother on the physical and moral imperatives of agrarian living. Less didactic but equally epic, C.W. Winter and Anders Edström’s
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) takes up the title and major themes of Hesiod’s verse for its own comprehensive look at a vanishing way of life in a small mountain village of forty-seven people in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. Running 480 minutes, the film is structured by the cadences of life, labor, and the environment alike: Over the course of five seasons, Winter and Edström present a portrait of a female vegetable farmer, her dying husband, and an extended group of friends and family whose shared sense of integrity, tradition, and perseverance slowly reveals itself as something uncommonly poignant, even profound.