The film—winner of the Encounters Golden Bear for Best Film at the 2020 Berlinale—is the second feature of C.W. Winter & Anders Edström. It is an eight-hour fiction shot for a total of twenty-seven weeks, over a period of fourteen months, in a village population forty-seven in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. It is a geographic description of the work and non-work of a farmer. A portrait, over five seasons, of a family, of a terrain, of a sound space, and of a duration. The film was named one of the Ten Best Films of the Year by critics at:
Artforum,
Cargo,
Cinema Scope,
Desistfilm,
Filo,
La Internacional Cinéfila,
Mubi,
Nobody,
Senses of Cinema, and
Sight & Sound.
The film is accompanied by this LP,
The Works and Days: The Black Sections, by C.W. Winter, and the photo book,
Shiotani, by Anders Edström. The album features musical excerpts from Tim Berne & Bill Frisell, Tony Conrad, Graham Lambkin, Mary Jane Leach, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Folke Rabe, Éliane Radigue, and Akio Suzuki. Producing, editing, and recordings by C.W. Winter. Mastered by
Stephan Mathieu.
Filmmaker C.W. Winter was born in California. In 2020, he completed his DPhil in Art Practice & Theory at The Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts where he studied closely under Thom Andersen, James Benning, and
Allan Sekula. His writing has appeared in
Cinema Scope,
Moving Image Source,
Purple, and
Too Much. He lives in the United Kingdom where he is a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art and a Lecturer at the University of Oxford.
