FCCJ Associate Member Ian Thomas Ash Makes His Mark With Documentaries

Ian Thomas Ash graduated in 2003 from New York’s Plattsburgh State University at age 23 with a major in English literature and a minor in theater, but with no particular plans, apart from a desire to widen his range of experience by going abroad.

On a whim, the native of Watertown, N.Y. – now an FCCJ Associate member – came to Japan on the JET program. He lived and worked in the mountains of Tochigi, in the small town of Batomachi.

“After doing the JET Program for three years, I did my first film, called Documenting Us, shown at the Tokyo International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 2003, and decided that was what I really wanted to do,” Ash says.

He planned to do a master’s degree in fine arts at Hong Kong Baptist University, but when the SARS epidemic broke out, Hong Kong stopped taking in foreign students. So Ash settled on his second choice: an M.A. in television and film production at the University of Bristol in the U.K.

Ash’s latest documentary, The Ballad of Vicki and Jake, was filmed in Bristol and tells the story of Vicki – a 35-year-old single mother struggling with methadone addiction – and her 10-year-old son Jake, who move from a homeless shelter into a council house in Bristol. The move brings with it a new set of problems, as Vicki’s drug-addicted ex-boyfriend Sid (Jake’s father) and other homeless doper friends use the house as a shelter on a regular basis, preventing her from straightening out her life.

Six months after filming was completed, Vicki became sick and died. What was intended as a 10-minute film grew into a 100-minute production, eventually cut down to 84 minutes.

Ash happened to meet Vicki as was walking through the streets of Bristol. He struck up a conversation with her and thought she had an interesting story to tell – one that was worth filming. There were a couple of hitches, though; students in the master’s program were not allowed to work part-time and were not allowed to work on their own films.

Ash did not have any funding or equipment. However, one of the professors in the course helped him by letting him and Singaporean cameraman Ken Kwek into the building in the evening to take out the necessary film equipment on condition it be brought back in the morning.

After filming finished, Ash graduated and returned to Japan. The editor was still in Britain, and he would talk with her over the phone, sending each other DVD cuts back and forth. “Now, we would do it on the Internet,” Ash says.

The film went on to win the Visions de Reel award award in Switzerland, be shown on public television in Canada and on satellite TV in New Zealand. It was banned by censors in Singapore because of “scenes showing instructive detail of drug use” that “glamorize or promote drug use.”

Ash is now working on a follow-up, entitled Jake’s Story, showing Vicki’s son between the ages of 11 to 17, with editing set to be finished in December. While flying yearly to North Wales, where Jake now lives, Ash worked on a promotional video for a Japanese golf club and made a documentary on now-deceased former Takurazuka actress and singer Natsuko Fukamidori.

Ash said making a documentary was a way for him to comprehend what was happening in Vicki’s life. “If you’re a writer, you’re a journalist; you make sense of things by putting it into sentences. I do it by putting it into a series of images,” he says. Ash adds that it’s cheaper to make documentaries because there isn’t a need for a large film crew. Only six people worked on The Ballad of Vicky and Jake. “I made a 10-minute short film for my MA dissertation, which had a crew of 19,” Ash said.

He notes that when making a documentary in Japan, you don’t need to ask permission to film people, whereas in Britain their permission is required. But in both countries Ash is a foreigner, which, he says, makes it easier for him to get people to talk to him.

“They don’t feel so much like they’re going to be judged,” he says.