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 “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.” JUGEND OHNE FILM—<a href="https://jugendohnefilm.com/the-thickness-of-things/" target="blank"><I>The Thickness of Things</i></a> by Patrick Holzapfel "Jacques Rivette once wrote that a good film begins with something being wrong. In *The Works and Days* there is something wrong in almost every shot, something that makes us look more closely, more attentively, until we realize that it’s not the shot that is wrong but the way we normally look at things. Those images do not want anything from us; they ask everything of us...In daily life, humanity has quite successfully and tragically domesticated the thickness of things, nature, and people. Cinema was quick to follow in this domestication. It’s a small miracle to discover a film that resists these modes of confined representation and reminds us of the roughness of things, their independence and inherent beauty: the dim light touching a somber window, the reflections of bodies in the water at dusk, the smell of tomatoes brought as gifts, a concert of frogs, a tired body leaning on a wall, a shadow moving behind a screen, a drunk story long forgotten and, always, the wind, the wind in the trees. *The Works and Days* proposes a way of perceiving that dares to become a way of living (and the other way round). To my mind, that is the most any film can be expected to do." 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.” ARTFORUM—<a href="https://www.artforum.com/film/jordan-cronk-on-c-w-winter-and-anders-edstroem-s-the-works-and-days-2020-86207" target="blank"><I>*Time Regained*</i></a> by Jordan Cronk “Winter and Edström present a portrait of a female vegetable farmer, her dying husband, and an extended group of friends and family whose shared sense of integrity, tradition, and perseverance slowly reveals itself as something uncommonly poignant, even profound…No mere observational account, *The Works and Days* is a highly collaborative and deceptively constructed fiction. Longtime creative partners, Winter—a CalArts graduate who studied under Thom Andersen, James Benning, and Allan Sekula and now lectures at Oxford—and Edström—a Swedish photographer whose work has been widely published and exhibited internationally—have spent two decades exploring an unusual form of cinema that combines elements of narrative, documentary, and sound art…*The Works and Days* may point the way forward further still. Here, the ordinary achieves monumentality through dedication—on the part of the filmmakers, certainly, who spent fourteen months filming on location in Shiotani, but most especially on the part of Tayoko, one of many villagers (in Shiotani, if not across greater Japan) performing mundane tasks to keep their households in order and provide for their families. In lesser hands, her life of hardship, including the death of her husband, Junji, could have been used as a device to elicit pity, or worse, to exploit. Instead, Winter and Edström utilize Tayoko’s circumstances as a framework through which to mount a loose retelling of their subject’s recent past that could act for her as a productive form of bereavement…In the film’s most devastating scene, Tayoko and Junji (played here as throughout by Kaoru Iwahana) visit a temple in Kyoto, where they lovingly reminisce about their courtship and marriage while seated in a rock garden. “It looks like the trees are speaking,” Tayoko observes as their conversation slowly grows quiet…It’s to its makers’ credit that none of these strategies disrupt the film’s elegiac tone, and instead add to its power and beauty as both an aesthetic object and a piece of dramatic storytelling…The film calibrates time though alternately intimate and expansive compositions that breathe in subtle syncopation with the natural world. In its very design, *The Works and Days* advocates not for a medium of convenience and disposability, but one of shared experience and lasting rewards.” FILM COMMENT—<a href="https://www.filmcomment.com/article/currents-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank"><i>Currents</i></a> by Jordan Cronk “Where such daunting length might suggest something tedious or one-note, *The Works and Days* is constantly shape-shifting, mixing ravishing landscape imagery and scenes of day-to-day labor with bustling dinner sequences and moments of alcohol-fueled camaraderie among an extended coterie of friends and fellow farmers. Across five chapters, Winter and Edström chart the community’s highs and lows, capturing instances of joy and sorrow, intimacy and death, the essence of the human spirit writ through time and the passing of the seasons. No mere feat of observation, this is a marvel of cinematic immersion…Now more than ever, *The Works and Days* speaks to the power, beauty, and necessity of the theatrical experience.” LONG VOYAGE HOME—<a href="https://longvoyage.substack.com/p/worksanddays" target="blank"><i>Antifragility</i></a> by Adam Cook “It is a film that evades durational conventions within both the cultural mainstream and the contemporary art cinema of which it may initially seem part and parcel. In fact, it avoids easy placement into any contemporary categories…The interest is in how co-directors C.W. Winter and Anders Edstöm render their anti-epic of minimalism, discreet construction, and de-privileging of moments—which, as with many great works of art, makes the poetic and the political inextricable. At odds with the clichés of slow cinema, *The Works and Days* operates in a durational mode that restores power to the cut, to the art of sequencing, to the fundamental building blocks of filmic language. In this way, it is intensely modern and deceptively classical.” 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 cinematic environs 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.” THE FILM STAGE—<a href="https://thefilmstage.com/the-works-and-days-review-a-monumental-vision-that-earns-its-runtime/" target="blank"><i>A Monumental Vision that Earns Its Runtime</i></a> by Glenn Heath, Jr. "An experimental study in duration and devotion that intricately overlaps voiceover and ambient sound design to create a symphonic cinematic space in the quietest of locations. Masterful. Unforgettable. With great vulnerability and honesty...*The Works and Days* brings you closer to understanding what it might mean to finally be at peace." THE NEW YORK TIMES—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/movies/the-works-and-days-review.html" target="blank"><i>The Time of Our Lives</i></a> by Nicolas Rapold "Its homey environs and lushly photographed natural world induce a heightening of the senses and an attention to lovely subtleties of light, color and fellow feeling...This isn’t durational cinema that’s dead-set on making you feel the heft of labor. The directors’ camera eye fosters more of a muscle memory for these places through sonic overtures and finely wrought images of lattices (brambles or wires), opaque screens and windows, and careworn pots. *The Works and Days* also plumbs the depths of night and twilight like few films do, harnessing a theater’s darkness...As someone in the film says, what one wishes of the people you love is that you could spend even more time with them—and the same could be said of the images in this film." HYPERALLERGIC—<a href="https://hyperallergic.com/662482/the-work-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank"><i>An Eight-Hour Film Captures the Rhythms of Farming Life in Rural Japan</i></a> by Forrest Cardamenis "A quiet epic. Winter and Edström’s commitment is reflected in the eight-hour runtime, which captures both the rhythm and feel of daily life and rural Japan’s continued environmental desecration better than any conventional movie could." CRITERION CAST—<a href="https://criterioncast.com/reviews/theatrical/joshua-reviews-c-w-winter-and-anders-edstroms-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin-theatrical-review" target="blank"><i>C.W. Winter and Anders Edström's The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)</i></a> by Joshua Brunsting "A once in a generation film...A work that thrives thanks to its profound intimacy...Concluding with one of the truly great final acts in recent memory. *The Works and Days* is a dense, layered, one of a kind masterpiece...A ground-shattering achievement." EDWARD MCCARRY—*A Note on The Works and Days* by Edward McCarry *The Works and Days*: present and earthbound, like an old woodpile, alive with termites. The length is necessary, natural, and is the least of what’s registered in viewing. The pleasures are immediate and moment-to-moment: the rhythms that emerge, dissolve, mutate, re-emerge; the plain company of people and the texture of the world, made strange; the film’s rigor and ease both, the freedom of transgressing rules established. The full weight of the experience is latent, blossoming late and with force; as is the narrative, taking shape out of the dirt and, diffusely, following it back down again. The deep, disarming sense of mystery is central, and it’s the reason Winter and Edström hold tight to the fiction (or reenactment) on a roiling canvas of reality. The form exists to bottle lived experience, to make it legible, and transmissible, and to set it roaming inside its parameters. Hence the default orientation of the camera is eye-level, looking down. It’s a transparent viewpoint that grounds vision, making no great secret of the apparatus, instead yielding to what’s being looked at. 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>