Enemies | Friends

Saturday afternoon the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival held a 1-day mini-festival at New People Cinema, where I saw Enemies | Friends, a documentary about a footnote to World War I. In 1914, the Japanese, as allies of the British, attacked the German colony of Tsingtao in China & took 4,700 German prisoners of war to prison camps in Japan, keeping them until well after the war ended. The German prisoners were not required to work, &, judging by photographs we see, they were healthy, well-fed & thrived. To stave off boredom, they made the camps into miniature villages, with farms, business districts, shops, restaurants & newspapers. They put on theater shows & art exhibitions & gave the 1st performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in Japan.

The documentary itself is meandering & provides a cursory picture of the period, using old photos, artwork, letters & interviews with historians & descendants of camp inmates, including a Japanese woman who discovered as an adult that her grandfather was German. The site of the Bandō camp is now a war museum exhibiting blond-haired mannequins in life-size dioramas of camp life.

The film was introduced by Sophoan Sorn, Festival Director, who read us a statement from the filmmaker. When I bought my ticket, I was asked to stand in a ticket holders line on the sidewalk, where I waited with 2 other patrons, but it turned out we should have been inside, where they were already letting people into the theater.

§ Enemies | Friends - German Prisoners of War in Japan
Feinde | Brüder - Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in Japan
Director: Brigitte Krause; Germany, Japan; 2013; 78 mins.

Berlin & Beyond Autumn Showcase 2014
North American Premiere
Sat., Oct. 11, 2014 - 2:00pm
New People Cinema, SF