Goodbye CP さようならCP Director: Kazuo Hara, Producer: Sachiko Kobayashi (1972)

Goodbye CP

さようならCP 「Sayonara CP」

Release Date: June 18th 1972

Duration: 82 mins.

Director: Kazuo Hara

Producer: Sachiko Kobayashi

Writer: N/A

Starring: Hiroshi Yokota, Koichi Yokozuka, The Green Lawn Association,

 IMDB

Goodbye CP (1972) was the first artistic collaboration between Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi, two photographers who became a husband-and-wife director-and-producer team who have spent the last 50 years documenting the lives of people living on the margins of Japanese society and agitating against its strictures. Through recording those who live differently, their works have shone a light onto points of conflicts based on identity, history, and class, and they reveal the social fault lines that the establishment chooses to ignore. With Goodbye CP, the conflict is between the able-bodied and the disabled.

Shot at a tumultuous time of student protests and when disability rights campaigns were taking on long-standing prejudices and disabled people were hidden or, in some cases, sterilised, and also when public awareness of Minamata disease was high, Goodbye CP was made to be different. While other documentaries might try to curry audience sympathy through depicting their subjects with sentimentality or lionising their struggle to live while disabled, Hara and Kobayashi’s film addresses audiences in a confrontational way in order to shake up views.