Green Jail
(Documentary, France / Taiwan, 2021, 100’, C, En / Fr ST)
by Yin-Yu Huang

Synopsis
There remains nothing but silence in the “Green Jail” on Iriomote Island, Okinawa, apan. Before World War II, “Green Jail” was a large-scale mining village, where thousands of miners from Kyushu, the Japanese colonies Taiwan and Korea and other laces in Japan were then imprisoned and exploited. Most of them died from malaria or were forced to work there. As for “Taiwanese miners”, the morphine injection was prevalent so that they could work nonstop day and night. The flm follows the last 4 years of Grandma Hashima’s life, the last survivor of colonial Taiwan, who knows the secrets of “Green Jail,” the notorious pre-World war II coal mine in Okinawa, Japan.
Reviews
“I started documentary flmmaking when I was still a college student. One of the courses back then was on visual anthropology, which became a foundation of my works. My pure interest in human beings, in people that I know nothing about, led me to observe others. Though I found that documentaries have the strength to change the world, they primarily help me to examine myself. Ten years passed, I’m still in this feld as a director, a producer, a distributor, as well as a curator. I believe that documentary flms can move forward and change the world little by little, and our responsibility is to bring these flms to a proper platform so that more and more people can access them.” Yin-Yu Huang, interview at the Emerging Producers program, 2020