Brazilian Migrants Start Anew in Japan

“They should show this to everyone going to Japan,” said Charles D. Teague ’74 as he walked out of the screening of “From Brazil to Japan,” a new documentary directed by Aaron Litvin ’04 and Ana Paula Hirano Litvin, focusing on the new trend of Brazilian immigration to Japan. By crafting a film that highlights the personal experiences of such a journey, the Litvins illuminate both the struggles of immigration as a whole as well as the emotional issues that arise from an ever-globalizing world.

On Tuesday, February 16th the documentary was screened in the TSAI Auditorium of the CGIS South building as part of Harvard’s Brazilian Film Series. It was followed by a question and answer session with the directors. In the audience there were many Brazilians and Japanese, including Mika Iga, Vice Consul in the Consulate General of Japan in Boston.

Over the course of the film, the Litvins tell five immigration stories in a way that is both nuanced and unique. “From Brazil to Japan” follows several families of Brazilian migrants over the course of three years, May 2006 to May 2009, as they move from São Paulo to a new life in Japan. Aaron Litvin explains their reason for choosing this format, saying, “There were many journalistic accounts as well as academic sociological articles about this Brazil-Japan trend, but there was no comprehensive work that followed the same people over time to show the actual developments, changes and experiences.”

In the documentary, the immigrants narrate their own stories, which include many touching, humorous, and heartbreaking moments. The voices of the filmmakers, on the other hand, are not discernable. “That was very conscious decision,” says Aaron Litvin. “We didn’t want to appear and we didn’t want our questions to appear. We decided to not have any external sound added to the film to try to make it as direct and transparent as possible.” This technique creates a sense of authenticity, as the audience gets to know to characters as they tell of their successes, disappointments, hard work, frustrations and personal growth.

Co-director Ana Paula Hirano Litvin says, “At the beginning, the documentary consists more of formal interviews in question and answer format. Then as we got to know the families, and became friends, they became comfortable with us and the camera, and they would talk about their experiences without us even asking. Sometimes we would just stay over at their apartments, cook together, and sleep on their floors. Some of our best scenes were filmed spontaneously at one or two in the morning.” Because of this special relationship between the filmmakers and subjects, the documentary is able to represent an immigration experience from the inside, exposing its full emotional tension.

When asked what inspired him to work on an immigrant story specifically, Aaron Litvin says, “My parents are immigrants from Moscow, who arrived to the U.S. a few years before I was born. Twenty years ago, a documentary in a similar style was made about my family, telling the story of Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union. This triggered my interest in making a film about immigration.”

Aaron Litvin was a Latin American Studies concentrator in the Romance Languages and Literatures department at Harvard. The idea for a film about Brazil and Japan grew out of Litvin’s senior thesis, entitled “Brazilian Okazaki, a case study of Brazilian migration to Japan.” During his time as an undergraduate, he visited Brazil and studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Okazaki, Japan.

“As an undergraduate in Okazaki, I wished I had a camera to capture the lives and experiences of the individuals I had met. I found it limiting to just do a thesis in writing that wouldn’t show their lives and that few people would read. I wanted to create something vivid, and I wanted more people to have the opportunity to learn about this movement,” says Aaron Litvin.

Following graduation, Litvin received a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a masters in sociology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He made the documentary as he finished his graduate work, explaining, “Whereas the research is trying to make generalizations and conclusions, the idea of the movie in parallel is to find the singularities, differences, diversity within this group. If there was anything we wanted to show, it is how different the experience is for each person, and how the expectations shape the experience.”