Directed by Julien Faraut, The Witches of the Orient is a seriously entertaining and often surprising documentary that explores the Japanese national women’s volleyball team in the early 1960s. The film is named after a nickname given to the team during their reign of international dominance and explores the origins of the team – which started as a local team that was constituted of workers from a textile factory – through to their appearance in the first Olympics to include volleyball as a sport – the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. It is a story of hard-work, tortuous training, resilience, and the emergence of a post-war industrial Japan and those that helped affirm Japan’s new national identity domestically and internationally.

In standard sports documentary fair, the film is largely composed of historical footage and contemporary interviews with the members of the team that remain. Yet, the overall aesthetic of the film is far from orthodox. Faraut intersperses footage of the various manga and anime which were inspired by the team’s efforts, which helps develop the mythological continuity of the team and affirm how they were a significant inspiration for early sports manga – a genre of manga that is incredibly popular to this day. As is humorously noted by one of the titular witches, they even inspired the ‘secret-weapon’ trope of modern sports manga – their real-life secret weapon being their ability to roll while returning the ball.

This is carried over to a personal highlight of the film: the various moments of montage in the film. To express the gratuitous nature of the training that these women underwent, Faraut interjects montages of real footage of the training sessions, which took place at the factory which the women worked. The coach, a World-War Two veteran, ran trainings sessions for the women that were unimaginably tough and bordered on torture. The film represents these sessions in creative montages that counterpoint real footage of the training sessions with a driving synth soundtrack. These montages are simultaneously fascinating and hard to watch – capturing such scenes as the coach pelting balls at a player over and over while walking towards her, eventually throwing balls at her prone, cowering body.

Recounting the training sessions takes up a significant portion of the film. And this is to great effect as the overall pace of the film is one of its strengths. For the first two-thirds of the film, the pacing of the film is meditative, slow – focussing more on the current lives of the team members left alive, and the events that lead them to becoming a team rather than the high-drama of the team’s reign of terror. This, coupled with the focus on the hardship of the training, means that when the film’s pace does build, it is fully earnt and exhilarating. The final-third focuses on the team’s appearance at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic finals against Russia – one of Japan’s most viewed TV events to this day. At this point the film reaches a fever pitch, largely thanks to the time the spectator has spent with the film’s subjects. The considered, slow pace of the first two-thirds all builds to this conclusion, as all the hardship and national pressure that has been established throughout the film rests on this one final moment.

While the outcome is determined, the time this film has taken to establish context of the final match results in a conclusion that is absolute ecstasy. The story itself is compelling enough that even if handled without Faraut’s stylistic flair, this film would have been worth a watch. However, with its understanding of pace and place, this film is a seminal sports film, a compelling documentary, and a narrative I will be thinking about for a long time.