Minamata (15)
Directed by Andrew Levitas
 

“A PHOTO is a small voice at best but sometimes, just sometimes, one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness.” Thus hardened war photojournalist W Eugene Smith, whose iconic picture in 1971 of a Japanese mother bathing her disease-stricken daughter, entitled Tomoko in Her Bath, did just that.

Co-writer-director Andrew Levitas’s powerful and heartbreaking drama tells the story of how Smith (Johnny Depp) shone a much-needed light on the plight of Japan’s Minamata coastal community which had been devastated by mercury poisoning.

Their calls for justice and compensation from the country’s Chisso Corporation, whose chemical factory had been polluting the area for decades, had fallen on deaf ears.

The film follows the troubled and reclusive Smith, secretly commissioned by the long-suffering editor of Life magazine Robert Hayes (the sublime Bill Nighy), to cover the story.

He heads to Minamata with Aileen Mioko (Minami), who he later married, and they embed themselves in the local community.

They befriended residents and took hundreds of black-and-white photos of people living with the Minamata disease and protesting and campaigning for compensation.

The pictures of victims with their deformed hands and feet and not being able to take care of themselves are harrowing, yet their strength through adversity is extraordinary and admirable.

Depp, who also produced the film, gives one of the best performances of his career in this transformative portrayal while Nighy, as usual, steals every scene he appears in.

As the end credits show, there are many more David v Goliath industrial pollution cases and the film is a striking reminder of the power of photojournalism and the difference one small act can make.

And it pays homage to the human spirit in finding hope in the most difficult moments.