Shinsuke Ogawa's remarkable documentary is a film quite literally a decade in the making: invited to make a documentary about village life, Ogawa and his crew moved onto a plot of land, took up rice farming, and didn't expose a frame of film for several years. Eleven harvests passed before the completion of Magino Village-A Tale. During that time, Ogawa developed a scientific knowledge of rice that grew toward a spiritual relationship with it-something the villagers took for granted and thrived on. "At just about the time we were beginning to understand the language of the rice," he said, "the villagers began to open up to us and we became conscious that our ears were now picking up the language of the village." He constructs Magino Village-A Tale in much the same way, opening us up first to the "soul" of farming, with close-in camera techniques and time-lapse photography. He then plunges us into the spiritual life of the village which connects the present to the past-through the earth. Villagers act out the stories of their ancestors, such as a peasant revolt and the discovery of a phallic stone kami (god) buried in an orchard. "By deconstructing the present through reconstruction of the past, Ogawa helps viewers understand the villagers' relationship with the universe and its history, as well as the ultimate source of revolution" (Hawaii Film Festival).