NEWS

I am overjoyed that The 49th Year (88 min, 2026) wins the 3SAT Documentary Film Award at Filmwoche Duisburg!

The 49th Year (88 min, 2026) wins the Hot Docs Joan VanDuzer Special Jury Prize-International Feature Documentary 2026 !

Jury’s Statement Duisburg:
Political activist Toshihiko Kamata has been in prison since 1980. In the early 1970s, in protest against Japan’s involvement in the Vietnam War, he carried out a series of bombings targeting local police stations in Tokyo and a U.S. military facility. Since 1980, his connection to the outside world has been television and the letters he writes and receives. Yet this isolation is not an individual one—nor is it confined to prison alone. For, as he writes, prison is a mirror of society; within it, society is distilled to its essence. He is thus at the very heart of his time, at the very center of the world. The film weaves together Kamata’s letters and writings, in which he recounts his past as a political activist, describes his daily life in prison, and at the same time reflects on social and political developments in Japan and the Western world—in a spare yet intelligent manner. The film makes the viewer the recipient of his letters.
The film creates spaces for reflection by juxtaposing the texts with images of contemporary Japan in a manner that is both simple and highly complex. In doing so, the filmmaker refrains from illustrating what is heard. Rather, the images take on a life of their own alongside Kamata’s laconic language; they evoke questions that run parallel to and challenge the text, creating spaces of experience for the audience. Small signs of political and social resistance appear time and again. THE 49TH YEAR is a highly topical and political film because it explores the possibility of shaping a future beyond the devastation wrought by capitalism and war. In Jewish tradition, the 49th year is the year of complete debt forgiveness, the release of slaves, and the restoration of freedom. A freedom that Toshihiko Kamata—and indeed, the world—has never stopped waiting for.
November 7, the jury: Andreas Goldstein, Nicole Kandioler-Biet, Nicole Vögele

Jury statement Hot Docs: “For its astute view on political ideologies and its meditative exploration of the true costs of radical action beyond isolated moments of protest and conventional electoral politics—and the ways in which periods of dissent can fade into enforced consensus, the jury recognizes Heidrun Holzfeind’s elegiac yet piercing attention to one man and the echoes of his resistance with the Hot Docs Joan VanDuzer Special Jury Prize-International Feature Documentary.”