PANORAMA-CINÉMA—<a href="http://www.panorama-cinema.com/V2/critique.php?id=1549" target="blank"><i>De l’arbre d’une vie et d’un champ de radis</i></a> by Ariel Esteban Cayer “There will be no more monumental film this year than *The Works and Days*…Its risk-taking, its ingenuity of means, its variety of methods, and its multiplicity of references separate *The Works and Days* from other duration exercises in cinema…It is undoubtedly one of those rare films to contain, humbly, just about everything of a lifetime.” CINEMA SCOPE—<a href="https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/the-land-demands-your-effort-c-w-winter-and-anders-edstrom-on-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank"><i>The Land Demands Your Effort</i></a> by Mark Peranson “C.W. Winter & Anders Edström’s eight-hour *The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)* premiered in the initial Encounters competition at the Berlinale, where it was the deserved winner…[A] brief introduction does no justice to the experience of watching *The Works and Days*, an utterly confident, magisterial effort that will stand the test of time.” <a href="https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/the-land-demands-your-effort-c-w-winter-and-anders-edstrom-on-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank">[Interview]</a> CON LOS OJOS ABIERTOS—<a href="http://www.conlosojosabiertos.com/la-internacional-cinefila-2020/" target="blank"><I>La Internacional Cinéfila</i></a> by Agnès Wildenstein “By far the best movie of the year. A tremendous cinematic pleasure. An unforgettable picture and sound screening experience. And a film that will remain in the history of cinema.” LE POLYESTER—<a href="http://www.lepolyester.com/critique-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank"><i>La traversée du temps</i></a> by Nicolas Bardot “This is not the story of a picturesque country setting; it is instead about how Edström and Winter squeeze out the experience of a place: by a litany of ​​images but also by an absence of images, by a richness of sound but also of silence…The film abolishes all relevance of a border between fiction and documentary and makes us live a rare and overwhelming immersion in a particular place, a secret world — but in this world hide a thousand worlds closer than we think. Crowned at the Berlinale in the excellent Encounters section, *The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)* is a small masterpiece that one imagines as quite unforgettable.” ARTFORUM—<I>Film: Best of 2020</i> by Erika Balsom “A day spent in darkness, a 480-minute wager that the long take is not the only path to duration. A sustained look at a family and the land that it works, at once intimate and expansive. More than a film to watch, *The Works and Days* is a film that engulfs you.” KINOSCOPE—<a href="https://read.kinoscope.org/2020/09/18/indielisboa-time-warp/" target="blank"><i>Time Warp</i></a> by Patrick Gamble “A verdant epic of agrarian labor and intimate moments, the film’s intimidating runtime is wholly justified, with the slow passage of time generating a form of detached immersion, allowing for a deeper connection with Tayoko and her surrounding environment…Certain films, like certain landscapes, stay with you long after you leave them, and *The Works and Days* is one such film — a tender and unforgettable portrait of a community on the brink of extinction.” PERLENTAUCHER—<a href="https://www.perlentaucher.de/berlinale-blog/2020/02/29/filmkritik-zu-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin-von-c-w-winter-und-anders-edstroem-encounter-berlinale-2020.html" target="blank"><i>Miteinder, met der Natur</i></a> by Jochen Werner “The most format-busting contribution to the already format-busting (and brilliantly curated) new Encounters section…The pictures arranged by Edström are modest, each not pushing itself to the fore. Though over the course of the eight hours we spend in and with the film, these images accrete into a cinematic place where one increasingly likes to be…Then there is the sound that is not only extremely present over the entire eight hours, but that continually gathers into a foregrounding over the images…In individual sequences, this foregrounding shifts so much that the film literally transforms itself into a sound art work, and these moments radiate beyond themselves…In this wonderful film, Winter and Edström invite us to spend a day with these people, experiencing how they live, how they work, tell stories, do nothing, and are simply with each other and with nature.” MOVIEBREAK—<a href="https://www.moviebreak.de/film/the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin" target="blank"><I>*The Works and Days* (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)</i></a> by Jakob Jurisch “It is a film not about waiting for something, but about the condition of waiting itself, which the film captures immersively and masterfully…*The Works and Days* meets and negates the Slow Cinema movement with a dynamic editing speed…It almost seems paradoxical that it is precisely the film’s narrative distance that makes the life of Tayoko and Junji so tangible…A life in full attention to both the cosmos and to eternal hustle and bustle. The mountain village stands in for this conscious life and feels more like a piece of home with every advancing film minute…*The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)* is perhaps the most conceptually daring of the extra-long films. With an enveloping staging and a meditative narrative structure, the directors allow a piece of life to unfold on the screen through their meticulous observation.” LE MONDE—<a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2020/11/23/eloge-du-temps-long-au-festival-entrevues-de-belfort_6060770_3246.html" target="blank"><i>Eloge du temps long au festival Entrevues de Belfort</i></a> by Clarisse Fabre “In a thousand variations of penumbra and darkness, *The Works and Days* is at once a filmed diary, a topographical survey, and the memory work of a village in the process of shrinking. Though all this says little of the hypnotic experience and poetry provided by this work, a film that is as much sonic as visual. Through a tight edit, never contemplative, this film, without programmed responses, sows in our minds a multitude of questions: how do we gaze at a landscape, what do we retain, what makes a story? The answer may lie in a tree whose leaves, filmed against the light of the sky, end up drawing a resting face. Only the imagination counts. And in front of *The Works and the Days*, we can dream.” FILM PARLATO—<a href="http://filmparlato.com/index.php/numeri/14/item/298-the-last-things-before-the-last-4-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin-c-w-winter-anders-edstroem" target="blank"><I>*La Magnifica Omissione*</i></a> by Edipo Massi & Erik Negro “The natural and the cyclical. Destiny as the corporeality of myth. Looks and acts. What endures. And a potential future. In this torrential film by C.W. Winter and Anders Edström, all this takes shape slowly, as in a burly and dense novel that delves into the depths and in which, from the particular, blossoms a vision of the universal. We should first start with the title, as it always should be with great films. Works and days, a declination of daily life that finds its essence in the minimal and nearly imperceptible movement of objects and affects. Like a (micro) family cosmology that slowly reveals itself, peacefully, minimally…An anthropological and metaphysical ritual on the flow of things…An act of magical realism where the sounds themselves become a space for evocation and continuous perspectival change…Here then is a formal approach in which existential drama, be it even death, appears only as a necessary and transitory moment, almost absorbed by the surrounding nature…The strength of all this fresco remains a certain suspension, not giving a precise shape to those who live in the novel, a turbid swarm of life that escapes being overly-ordered by thought and writing. It is a unique, poetic phrasing…evoking both a presence of the past and an absence of certain aspects of the present…The visual and associative grammar of this mass of images, which goes beyond the simple meditative experience, essentially starts from a space and allows the stories it contains to flow into existence…Here is the ghost of Ozu as an evocation of generations and identities, in every timid, ostensible, and elegiac hint of a past in false starts. Tayoko reads off-screen, as if by chance, from minimal diaries, so similar in their power to the famous ones of Ozu, with that light and crystalline touch tracing aspects of life almost unseen…Here is the blossoming of life, making relevant what is marginal, with the expression of the smallest moment, even the most casual and inadvertent, and the pure revelation of it all…The manifestation of something that comes from within, the expression of duration, tangible, visual, and practicable in its soundscape. There are confessions and stories in the film that have the fragility of memory and the provocation of epiphany…And it is precisely the editing, which in this film seems the doing of a sublime worker camouflaged in the landscape, creating an amazement of the unexpected, a rewriting that brings us into the temporary presents to which we are constantly called. And finally let's go back to the extreme, yet very simple, conceptualization of that title. To Hesiod (*Ἔργα καὶ Ἡμέραι, Erga kài Hemérai, The Works and Days*) and perhaps to Rossellini, to his *The Iron Age*, to the inevitability of the condition of man forced to work in order to survive, but at the same time an ode to virtue and to open space, to an existence from which is revealed the essence of dignity…In this, every spatial form shows itself in its definitively temporal aspect; a great game that only cinema, and perhaps some great novels, can access.” CARGO—<a href="https://www.cargo-film.de/gespraech/webmagazin/anders-edstrom-cw-winter/" target="blank"><I>*Abundance and Repetition*</i></a> by Martin Grennberger & Philip Widmann <a href="https://www.cargo-film.de/gespraech/webmagazin/anders-edstrom-cw-winter/" target="blank">[Interview]</a> <br>