"Elegant as a print by Hokusai, Red Persimmons is the fruit of a posthumous collaboration between the late Shinsuke Ogawa and his Chinese disciple Peng Xiaolian, who combined footage shot in 1984–85 with her own additions some fifteen years later. Their documentary is a study in local knowledge-the cultivation and harvest of persimmons in tiny Kaminoyama. Highly astringent when picked, these recalcitrant fruits are clipped, sorted, peeled, and left to dry, before being packaged as candy-sweet delicacies. Human industry and ingenuity is the film's true subject. One woman recounts with gratitude how, when she couldn't master her mother-in-law's peeling method, her late husband devised a special knife to save her thumb from being cut repeatedly. The fabrication of a mechanical peeler from bicycle gears forms a separate chapter, with different villagers taking credit for the innovation. The film is a moving revelation of a microcosm soon to vanish" (Leslie Camhi, Village Voice).