Koshien: Japan's Field of Dreams
This Sporting Life
•
1h 33m
Directed by Ema Ryan Yamazaki • Documentary • 2019 • 94 minutes
Baseball is life for the die-hard competitors in the 100th annual Koshien, Japan's wildly popular national high school baseball championship, whose alumni include U.S. baseball star Shohei Ohtani and former Yankee Hideki Matsui. But for Coach Mizutani and his players, cleaning the grounds and greeting their guests are equally important as honing their baseball skills.
In director Ema Ryan Yamazaki's dramatic and intimate journey to the heart of the Japanese national character, will those acts add up to victory or prove a relic of the past?
"Compelling and illuminating! Its heartbreaking agonies and hard-earned ecstasies make 'Koshien' eminently worth watching." - Mark Schilling, Japan Times
Up Next in This Sporting Life
-
Off the Road
Directed by José Permar • Documentary • 2020 • 78 minutes
Each year, the slow-paced lifestyle on Mexico’s largest desert in Baja Peninsula is given a turbo boost by the Baja 1000, the largest off-road motorsport race in the world that takes place crossing the Mexican-US border.
In this modern-d...
-
Mountain
Directed by Jennifer Peedom • Documentary • With Willem Dafoe • 2018 • 73 minutes
Only three centuries ago, setting out to climb a mountain would have been considered close to lunacy. Mountains were places of peril, not beauty, an upper world to be shunned, not sought out. Why do mountains now h...
-
The Big Game
Directed by E. J. Vaughn • Documentary • 1982 • 60 minutes
Part of the acclaimed Middletown series.
As Muncie Central and Anderson High prepare to meet for the annual basketball game, a game charged with the spirit of long-established rivalry, THE BIG GAME examines what this competition, and th...
