Litmus Films made this documentary for Japanese public broadcaster NHK in 2008, for its series 'Kodawari Life Europe'.

Storyteller profiles Hugh Lupton, who co-founded the Company of Storytellers (with Ben Haggarty and Sally Pomme Clayton) in 1985, and has long been the standard-bearer for professional storytelling in the UK, taking the power of the spoken word from pubs and campsites into theatres and festivals.

This was one of the first documentaries to note this trend towards the increasing respect, even amid the internet boom, that the public was affording traditional storytelling. Storytelling workshops, and theatrcial performances are, fortunately, now relatively unremarkable events, but his shows how quickly things have changed.

As a seeker of the apparently obscure, and a celebrant of the hidden story, Litmus Films is accustomed to being asked why we were making films in Japanese, for the Japanese public broadcaster, that domestic broadcasters weren't even paying any attention to.

We still can't answer such questions, but are grateful to NHK for commissioning these films.

So we hope you enjoy this 2008 film and it's lively documentation of the green shoots of the re-professionalisation of this most ancient, and most fundamentally human, of art forms.