Ogawa Shinsuke was not an obvious festival founder. He spent the 1960s and 1970s living among rice farmers in Sanrizuka and Magino, making marathon documentaries about communities resisting state power. His films were raw, intimate, and resolutely uncommercial. But Ogawa understood something about documentary cinema that festival programmers in Europe and North America had overlooked: the form was thriving across Asia, and it had no dedicated stage. He lobbied Yamagata Prefecture and the city government until they agreed to host the first edition in October 1989 -- the same month the Berlin Wall fell. That inaugural festival screened 80 films and included a retrospective honoring Robert and Frances Flaherty, the husband-and-wife team whose 1922 film Nanook of the North helped define the documentary genre.

The festival's top honor, the Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize, carries more than prestige. For filmmakers working in nonfiction -- a genre perpetually starved of funding -- winning at Yamagata can mean the difference between making a next film and abandoning the profession. The grand prize sits alongside the Mayor's Prize for excellence, a Special Jury Prize, and a Runner-up Prize in the international competition. The regional competition awards the Shinsuke Ogawa Prize, established in 1993 to encourage emerging Asian documentary directors and named for the festival's late founder. A Citizens' Prize, voted on directly by audience members, rounds out the slate. The awards have elevated filmmakers from China, South Korea, the Philippines, and across Southeast Asia into international recognition.

What distinguishes YIDFF from purely competitive festivals is its curatorial ambition. Nearly every edition pairs the competition with a major retrospective or thematic program that places new work in historical context. The 1995 festival honored the Lumiere brothers' cinematograph centennial. In 1999, the spotlight fell on Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, whose career spanned from 1920s avant-garde experiments to late-career meditations on wind and rain. The 2001 edition screened retrospectives of American filmmaker Robert Kramer and Japanese master Fumio Kamei. The 2005 festival broke new thematic ground with a program on Zainichi Koreans -- the ethnic Korean community in Japan -- alongside a collaboration with Switzerland's Visions du reel festival on personal documentary. These curated programs transform each edition into something closer to a film school than a red carpet.

Yamagata sits in a narrow inland basin surrounded by the Ou Mountains, far from Tokyo's media corridors and a world away from the glamour circuits of Cannes or Venice. That remoteness is part of the point. Filmmakers arrive in a small, walkable city where screenings happen in intimate theaters, Q-and-A sessions run long, and directors share izakaya tables with the audience after hours. By 2007, the festival was screening 238 films per edition and drawing crowds of 23,000. The 2023 edition received 1,633 submissions from 109 countries. Since 2001, films shot on digital video have been eligible alongside traditional formats, reflecting the festival's early embrace of the technological shifts reshaping documentary production. For one week every two years, Yamagata proves that the most important film festival in any genre does not need to be in a capital city.