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Through his award-winning documentary, Sumo East and West, Robert Edwards ’85 reveals the cultural changes facing Japan as bigger, heavier wrestlers of Polynesian descent enter the ancient sport of sumo wrestling. Shot in Hawaii, Los Angeles, Atlantic City, and Japan, the film has been screened at many festivals since its debut in May 2003 at the Tribeca Film Festival and will make its broadcast premiere on the PBS program “Independent Lens” in June.
“In Japan, the sport is about 2,000 years old and its origins are shrouded in ancient Japanese history and culture,” says Edwards. “There’s noanalogue in America; it’s literally connected to the Shinto religion. They fight on a dirt platform raised four feet high and the dirt is blessed by a Shinto priest.”
The film also shows the contrasting world of amateur sumo in the West, with its commercialization, lack of ritual, “ring girls” wearing skimpy outfits, and rock and roll music. Edwards served as writer, sharing the roles of producer and editor with his wife, Ferne Pearlstein, who also was director and cinematographer.
A history graduate, Edwards spent six and a half years as an infantry and intelligence officer with the U.S. Army before entering Stanford University’s master’s program in documentary film in 1994. His 1996 film Paranoia—inspired by a skydiving accident in which he broke his back—was shown on television and at film festivals in more than a dozen countries.
Most recently, his film The Voice of the Prophet, an interview with Rick Rescorla, a veteran of three wars and head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, who was killed in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, was shown at Sundance, Toronto, Human Rights Watch, and numerous other festivals, and on television around the world. Edwards edited Barry Levinson’s feature-length documentary Yesterday’s Tomorrows, which was part of a traveling exhibition of the Smithsonian Institution, and Abandoned: The Betrayal of America’s Immigrants, a PBS documentary about immigration reform that premiered at the 2000 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and won a DuPont-Columbia Journalism Award.
In 2001, Edwards received the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his script Land of the Blind, which he is scheduled to begin filming this summer, starring Ralph Fiennes.