One of the more intriguing titles of this year’s Berlin Film Festival is the new Johnny Depp true life drama, Minamata in which Depp plays the famous Life Magazine photographer W.
Eugene Smith who in 1971 undertook the most challenging and important subject of his career in travelling to the small Japanese village of Minamata which had been ravaged by an outbreak of Mercury Poisoning due to gross negligence by Japan’s Chisso Corporation, the government itself, and even the Yakuza.
The important and heartbreaking movie, which I caught at CAA in Los Angeles a few days ago, documents Smith’s efforts to chronicle the tragic effects of the disease and the MInamata inhabitants’ heroic efforts to fight back.
As the film shows, Smith was an enormously gifted, if difficult personality, and had to practically beg a reluctant Life to give him this opportunity, but the results were eye-opening and
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