by JASON QUILL & RICHARD PHILLIPS
Minamata, directed by artist and film producer Andrew Levitas (Georgetown), is about the industrial poisoning of a Japanese fishing village by the Chisso chemical company, and the struggle, beginning in 1971, by famed photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith to reveal the disastrous human consequences of this corporate crime.
Between 1951 and 1968, Chisso dumped thousands of tons of untreated wastewater containing the highly-toxic methylmercury into Minamata Bay in southwest Japan, poisoning local fish and other sea life.
Local residents, having always eaten fish from the bay, noticed strange behaviour and illness amongst cats in the 1950s, and then, in 1956, the first human cases appeared.
In the years that followed thousands of residents, including children suffered muscle weakness, disability, insanity, coma and death from severe mercury poisoning, with the company denying any responsibility for the health catastrophe.
Today, 2,283 people have been officially recognised as patients and it is widely acknowledged that over 75,000 people suffered from Minamata mercury poisoning. Over 1,700 lawsuits are still ongoing.
Minamata is a forceful examination of Chisso’s ruthless attempts to prevent any exposure of its operations and the suffering of its victims. Based on the book Minamata: A Warning to the World, by W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Mioko, the 115-minute film has brought its director into conflict with MGM, the movie’s North American distributor.
Levitas’s movie was completed in late 2019 and premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in early 2020 and was supposed to be released in the US and the UK in February 2021. This did not occur.
MGM, notwithstanding a handful of international screenings this year, has “buried” the film, refusing to announce a North American release date because of the alleged “personal problems” of the film’s lead actor Johnny Depp. We will return to MGM’s outrageous censorship below.
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