The Birth of Saké

A sake brewery a century and a half old, in Ishikawa in the north of Japan. From October to April, for six months, a crew of twenty-five live there. They do not go home. The shifts run through the night because the rice and the yeast keep their own hours. The oldest of them is seventy, the youngest in his twenties. The work is done by hand, and the number of people who can do it falls every year. The film watches those six months from start to finish. Erik Shirai directs; ninety minutes. He worked as a cameraman on food programmes before this. There is no narrator; the sound and the images come from the brewery itself. It was shot across two winters, living alongside the master brewer and the workers.