A passing note about NOVA

About NOVA, the school featured in this film:

At the time of filming in 1997, NOVA was in it’s heyday. Their slogan was “ekimae ryugaku” which means “study abroad, right next to the railway station”. While I was there, they were expanding like crazy, with new schools popping up at railway stations everywhere. Mine was right by the Shijo Kawaramachi Hankyu station in the heart of Kyoto. I was lucky to be working in a really young school. They start small, and quickly grow freakishly big.
The company mushroomed until in 2004, it had enrolled 410 000 students in 623 schools. However, just three years later they were bankrupt; 7000 teachers showed up for work one day to find the doors permanently locked.

So perhaps, in way, “Heartful English” has also become a eulogy to a once formidable institution that has left it’s mark on the lives of many young people of my generation. I call the film a personal documentary, which I believe is the best way to describe it. So while NOVA appears in the film, hard facts and details about the school and its rise and fall are not given.

So now you know.

Synopsis

Like many of my peers who received Arts degrees in the 1990’s, I spent a year teaching English in Japan. I borrowed a Bolex 16 mm film camera and began documenting what seemed at the time, a brave new world. I also recorded conversations with my students. The resulting film is a poetic, somewhat surreal meditation on the nature of communication. It is also a crumpled love note to a country that has intrigued and mystified Westerners like no other. Heartful English is tied together by a series of loose visual metaphors and recurring themes – most notably the train imagery which permeates the film.

Heartful English

This is the official website for the film “Heartful English” by Michael Hey.

format = 16 mm

runtime = 26 minutes

To contact Michael, email me at brilliantmovies@gmail.com.