Author: matteoB

Idemitsu Mako What a Woman Made (2026)/part 1

The retrospective Idemitsu Mako What a Woman Made, currently on view at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (July-September 2026), is one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever devoted to the pioneering video artist and filmmaker. Bringing together films, video works, installations, and archival materials, it offers an unprecedented overview of more than five decades of Idemitsu’s artistic practice, tracing the evolution of a body of work that has consistently explored gender, domesticity, motherhood, and the mediated construction of female identity, especially in Japan.
I visited the exhibition, which also featured special screenings of Idemitsu’s works, over two days in July, immersing myself completely in her world. It was one of the most extraordinary artistic experiences I’ve had in 2026, an aesthetic revelation that continues to resonate within me.
From the museum’s homepage:

Idemitsu Mako (b. 1940) is a pioneering artist in the fields of experimental film and video art in Japan. After spending time in the United States during the 1960s, she began creating works that explored themes such as the lives of women, family, and the relationship between media and society, using film and early video as her mediums. Her video works from the 1970s onwards in
particular incorporate the narrative techniques of television melodramas to depict themes such as mother-child relationships, the dynamics of marriage, and women’s social roles from a unique perspective. In recent years, as the global conversation surrounding gender and the body continues
to grow, her practice has received renewed attention.
The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum acquired Idemitsu Mako’s complete film and video works, as well as her major installation pieces, between 2017 and 2018. This large-scale retrospective offers a comprehensive overview of Idemitsu’s artistic practice, including works that are being exhibited for
the first time since their acquisition by the museum. A total of 45 works, including those in the museum’s collection, will be presented through exhibitions and screenings.

As a future reference for myself and for anyone who might stumble upon this page, I’ll be publishing my notes on every work I saw during my two-day stay in Tokyo. They’re rough impressions rather than finished reviews, but I hope they’ll prove useful, whether as a personal archive or for readers interested in Idemitsu remarkable body of work.
Hopefully I longer piece will eventually emerge from this work in progress.
(Works are listed in the order I saw them)

Part 1

“My 16 mm works are about creating another world to escape the rigid routine of daily life. Even now, film retains something of that quality, whereas video is a reflection of everyday reality. These two mediums exist as completely distinct entities. When I shoot on film, I want to detach myself from daily life and capture images that are incredibly beautiful. I actually love these kinds of films. For me, film and video stand clearly apart from each other.”
Interview with Idemitsu Mako The Complete Works of Idemitsu Mako, 1970-1996, Pandora, 1996, p. 21


Another Day of a Housewife (1977) Video
Presented on a big television, this is the work that opens the exhibition.
This early video observes the everyday routines of a housewife—played by Idemitsu herself—through a series of long, static takes. Waking up, cooking, washing the dishes, grocery shopping, hanging laundry, calling friends on the phone. Throughout the film, a giant eye—again, the filmmaker’s own—repeatedly appears on a television monitor, silently watching the protagonist.
The constant presence of this eye is deeply unsettling. It evokes the omnipresence of the media, but even more powerfully, especially in the film’s darker, more intimate scenes, it comes to embody the internalized gaze of society: an apparatus of self-surveillance through which the protagonist judges and disciplines herself. The eye is at once external and internal, suggesting that social expectations have become inseparable from the housewife’s own consciousness.
Although this is not the first work in which Idemitsu incorporates television monitors, Grandmother, Mother, Daughter (1976) is probably the one, it is perhaps the first in which they function as a channel and window to the protagonists’ inner world. This formal device would become increasingly central to her work throughout the 1980s, eventually evolving into one of the defining features of her visual language, often referred to as the “Mako Style.”

*

Woman’s House (1972) 16mm
First work in 16mm by Idemitsu, the film is the recording, a re-composition of Womanhouse, an exhibition conceived by Judy Chicago and Mirian Schapiro at the California Instutite of Arts in 1971.
Small objects, clothes, interiors of a room, curtains, dolls, everything bathed in bright light. The screen is saturated with white from the very first shot. Surreal: fake breast cover the ceiling and walls, later giving way to sunny-side-up eggs.

What a Woman Made (1973) video
Static white sceen with a voice talking on it, the topic is gender roles for children as expected and codified in Japanese society. The image on screen is out of focus, abstract-like, and only toward the end does it gradually come into focus, revealing a tampon swirling in a toilet bowl. Idemitsu’s first significant work, also from a feminist point of view.

Great Mother (Harumi) (1983) video
Great Mother (YUMIKO) (1984) video
Great Mother (Sachiko) (1984)
Trilogy inspired by the Jungian concept of the “Great Mother”.
The relationship between mother and daughter varied in each work, but it’s alway excessive in hate or love.
The rebellious girl in the seond part seems to represent Idemitsu herself, who grew up in an affluent and powerful family.
In the last segment the mother/daughter relationship it’s not only very strong, but also a necessary shield, a safe space, against the violence, physical and mental, perpetrated daily by the husband (another vile male figure in the Idemitsu’s universe). Of the three the last is perhaps the nastiest in relation to the position and role played by the man, who is a representation of the alpha male/Japan/masculinity embedded in Japanese society.
Worth noting: in the last video, the television monitor is used also horizontally, as a table.
What is most astonishing here is the way the television monitors function not only as a means of materializing Jungian archetypes, but also of introducing multiple temporalities. They become windows onto the past or onto moments from another person’s life, collapsing different psychological and temporal dimensions into the same video space (“video is time” as Nam June Paik has stated and Maurizio Lazzarato expanded upon).

*

At Santa Monica 3 (1975) 16mm
Black-and-white silhouettes, the sun slowly setting, shifting patterns of light and shadow, reflections in constant motion. Accompanied by music by John Cage “String Quartet in Four Parts”, the film unfolds as an impressionistic vision of her house in Santa Monica and surroundings, where Idemitsu lived for many years. Probably the best work of her first period (in 16mm), at least amongst the ones I’ve seen.

Next (1973) 16mm
Single channel video form the original 16mm, Next collects together several works by artist CIBA: colorful geometrical shapes on white background, reds and yellows predominate.

At Any Place 4: From the Habanera of a Housewife by Yoneyama Mamako (1978) 16mm
Projected on a wall of the exhibition on single-channel video. Idemitsu continues her interest in shooting and re-elaborating on stage performances, here pantomime Yoneyama Mamako’s performance is overlayed with images of natural places she filmed. Visually and for its use of a wide range of music is a very fascinating work.

Queer as Punk (Yihwen Chen, 2025)

“Malaysia is a multiracial nation, ruled by a single coalition for over 60 years, using religious extremism and racist discrimination to remain in power.”

“With widespread conversion practices and state-sponsored discrimination and violence, LGBTQI people are criminalised through colonial-era laws”

“Ethnic Malay persons are born Muslim from birth and for life. The bureaucracy makes it almost impossible for Muslims to renounce Islam.”

These are just a few of the statements that appear on screen in the opening minutes of Queer as Punk, Yihwen Chen’s documentary following the Malaysian punk band Shh…Diam! over the course of several years. Right from the start, the film makes it clear that this is about much more than music. Through the lives of the band’s four members, it paints an intimate portrait of what it means to be part of the LGBTQI community in contemporary Malaysia, where personal identity and political reality are almost impossible to separate.

The documentary opens with one of the band’s performances before introducing the country’s political and social landscape through footage of demonstrations against discrimination, immediately establishing the political framework within which the band’s story unfolds. The film then follows the four members of the group as they travel from Kuala Lumpur to Penang for a concert before crossing into Thailand to perform at an open-air music festival.

Formed in 2009 by a group of young LGBTQI “losers,” as they jokingly describe themselves, the band quickly emerges as more than a musical project: it is a community and a space of mutual support for people who often have severed the relations with their families and who struggle to fit in a very traditional and conservative society. The documentary focuses on three of the band’s members, Yon, Yoyo and especially on Faris, the guitarist and lead singer, a trans man, who is often the one speaking in front of the camera, about his plans for the future, his fears or his dreams.

Structured almost like a visual diary, Queer as Punk moves briskly, punkishly I would dare to say, freely jumping from one episode to another without lingering to long on any single event, as it follows the band’s lives through a series of deeply personal moments, while the country’s political climate continues to evolve around them.
A pivotal moment, for instance, arrives with the general election of May 9, 2018, when the opposition coalition won power for the first time in more than six decades. For many Malaysians, and especially for marginalized communities, the result generated genuine optimism and the hope that meaningful social change might finally be possible.

The documentary then moves with the band to the United Kingdom, where they perform at a small venue, and where the wedding between Yoyo and an English woman is celebrated. An event that would have been legally impossible in Malaysia.
Returning to Malaysia in 2019, the group becomes involved in a theatrical production responding to the public caning of a lesbian couple the previous September, a punishment that provoked condemnation both domestically and internationally, one of the most emotionally charged moments of the whole film.
In another revealing sequence, the band’s leader speaks with a trans woman, now apparently living in Singapore, who reflects on how the situation for sexual minorities has changed over the decades in the city. Somewhat paradoxically, she argues that the 1980s, before the rise of social media and the intensification of contemporary culture wars, felt, in certain respects, more tolerant and open.

The final section moves into 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Bassist Yoyo relocates to the United Kingdom to live with her partner because, although they are legally married there, their marriage is not recognized in Malaysia, preventing the couple from building a life together in Yoyo’s home country. The documentary ends with Faries undergoing gender-affirming top surgery, a deeply personal milestone that functions as a hopeful closing note, the beginning of a new chapter, as it were.

鹿の国 Shika no kuni/Guardians of the Harvest (Hiro Riko, 2025)

I’d been meaning to write something about 鹿の国 Guardians of the Harvest for months, but the documentary’s sheer scope, my fascination with the themes it explores (which led me, among other things, to discover the work of artist Ōkojima Maki) and, not least, the complexity of its construction kept getting in the way. In the end, its inclusion in this year’s Nippon Connection lineup, along with my collaboration with Sonatine covering the festival, gave me the excuse I needed to finally gather my thoughts into a review. I had originally planned to write a much longer essay instead….maybe another day….(This is a slightly different version of the review posted on Sonatine).

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“Ancient beliefs in Suwa are said to have centered around Mishaguji, the spirit of natural forces, or the power of nature that presides over the cycle of life and death. This was neither monotheism nor polytheistic animism, in the sense of folk traditions that revere a range of minor or localized “gods”. The formless and omnipresent Mishaguji spirit could be summoned by a shaman and could come to possess a piece of land, a tall tree, a large rock, or any other natural object (…) Although the ancient shamanistic Mishaguji cult lost its dominant position, its practices ‘snuck back’, as it were, into the rituals of the Suwa Shrine in Shinto disguise. The original spiritualism of Suwa had nothing to do with later Japanese Shintoism, and was in fact more similar to the shamanism that had existed for millennia in many parts of Asia.”
Matsuzawa Yutaka and the Spirit of Suwa, Shimada Yoshiko

During the three winter months of the Ōmuro Shinto ritual, the divine spirit Mishaguji is invoked into a young boy, who becomes the living deity known as the Ōhōri. He is then secluded within a semi-underground sanctuary called the Ōmuro, where numerous ritual performances are conducted before him throughout the winter. With the arrival of spring, the cycle culminates in the Ontōsai festival, during which seventy-five deer heads are offered to the Ōhōri in a ceremony symbolizing the renewal of life and the bond between humans, the divine, and the natural world.

Situated at the intersection of the Itoigawa-Shizuoka Tectonic Line and the Central Tectonic Line, the Suwa basin occupies the geological heart of the Japanese archipelago. These fault lines are not merely geological fractures but channels through which myths, beliefs, and human movement have flowed for millennia. Parallel to the overlapping of religious practices, the documentary merges a visual anthropologic approach (producer Kitamura Minao would call it visual folklore) with a poetic one, reenactments, and with more experimental bits that make it one of the more unique non-fiction works coming out of the archipelago in recent years.

“Mishaguji, Misaguji, Misakuchi, Saguji, Sagu, Sago…” Over slow-motion images of a snow-covered forest, where deer silently leap through the trees, these words open Guardians of the Harvest, though I much prefer its Japanese title, Shika no kuni (The Land of Deer). Its central concerns are multiple and ultimately ineffable, much like the many names given to the spirits or deities that have inhabited this land throughout history. These names may refer to the same elusive presence, or perhaps they instead evoke the fluid, ever-changing power of the rituals, folk practices, and mythologies that have shaped the region across centuries.
The region is the Suwa Basin, in the Shinshū region—present-day Nagano Prefecture—and takes as its point of departure the unique religious culture surrounding Suwa Taisha, one of Japan’s oldest shrines. The shrine’s rituals and traditions preserve traces of belief systems that long predate institutional Shinto, offering a rare glimpse into layers of religious practice that have endured through centuries of transformation. Here, the ancient worship of the enigmatic Mishaguji (Misakuchi, Saguji, Sagu…) spirits intertwines with medieval Buddhist doctrines, hunting customs, and agricultural rites, forming a singular spiritual and material landscape in which disparate traditions continue to coexist and reshape one another.

Hiro, a filmmaker who lived and did field research in Nepal and in the Himalayas, together with producer Kitamura Minao—one of Japan’s foremost documentary filmmakers, still largely undiscovered outside the country, and someone who has studied the Suwa region for decades—structures the film around the changing seasons and the rituals associated with each stage of the year. Winter gradually gives way to spring, ceremonies unfold in step with the rhythms of the natural world, and the reconstruction of the medieval Ōmuro (great chamber) Shinto rite becomes less an exercise in historical reenactment than an attempt to recover a forgotten way of understanding life itself. The living deity embodied in a child and known as the Ōhōri, secluded for months within a semi-subterranean sanctuary; the ritual consumption of venison; performances offered to the gods; and, ultimately, the sacrifice of seventy-five deer heads all point toward a conception of existence in which human beings remain inseparable from the cycles that sustain them.

The reenactment of the Ōhōri ritual, performed by local residents, occupies a substantial portion of the documentary, which constantly shifts between these reconstructed ceremonies, breathtaking images of the Suwa Basin and Lake Suwa (at times drone photography is perhaps overused), scenes of rice planting and harvesting, and footage of communal gatherings and seasonal rites. A female narrator guides the film throughout, while the reconstructed Ōhōri sequences introduce a male voice whose less restrained, almost joyous delivery occasionally recalls that of a traditional town crier.

It is within these reenacted passages that one of the documentary’s few less convincing elements appears: the rather incongruous use of CGI to depict serpentine spirits. More problematic, at least for some viewers, are the graphic scenes of deer killing. Yet these moments are inseparable from the spiritual terrain the film seeks to investigate, even if they occasionally verge on, or can be percieved as, romanticizing an ancient way of life. Fortunately, Guardian of the Harvest never settles into a glorification of a mythical past, but it takes more the shape of a rigorous study. Moreover, its mosaic-like structure allows meanings to remain layered, ambiguous, and at times opaque, resisting any simplistic reading of the practices it depicts.
Ultimately, it is the overwhelming power of the imagery—above all the recurring, almost symbolic figure of the deer, around which the entire film seems to orbit, hence the Japanese title—together with Hara Marihiko’s evocative score, which moves effortlessly between electronic textures, chamber music, and solo piano, that elevates the documentary into something far more than an ethnographic record. It becomes an immersive meditation on ritual, memory, and humanity’s place within the non-human world.

The documentary has enjoyed a remarkable run in Japan’s mini-theater circuit, where strong word of mouth has repeatedly filled small cinemas and led to encore screenings nearly a year after its initial release, January 2025. As a companion project, the production company behind the film, Visual Folklore, together with director Hiro Riko, also released Suwa, a short film exploring the basin’s rituals and traditions from a woman’s perspective, with text by actor Konoe Hana. It is available to watch online.
One final word should be reserved for the documentary’s beautiful poster. Its artwork was created by the artist unit Ohkojima Maki, who undertook extensive research into the Suwa region and its cosmology before producing the image. Their work offers a fascinating visual interpretation of the beliefs and myths explored in the film, and some of the reflections developed in this review were inspired by their own writings and artistic research on the subject.

last image of the film

Hōryū-ji (Hani Susumu, 1958)

Last February in Osaka, I had the chance to attend some screenings of the special program Cinematographer Segawa Jun’ichi: Tracing Japanese Documentary Cinema through His Works. One of the films I had not seen before, and the one that left the deepest impression on me, was Hōryū-ji (also tautologically known as Hōryū-ji Temple), a 23-minute short directed by Hani Susumu in 1958, and probably one of the peaks of the period the filmmaker spent at Iwanami Productions — alongside, at least from the perspective of documentary history, Children in the Classroom (1954) and Children Who Draw (1956).

The temple, located in Nara, is said to house some of the oldest surviving wooden structures in the world, dating back to the Asuka period (538–710), and remains one of the most celebrated and visited sacred sites in Japan. The complex became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, and it is worth noting that many of the statues depicted by Hani and Segawa were not normally accessible to the general public. In this sense, the documentary also offered a rare opportunity to see these magnificent sculptures in all their beauty — and in colour (an Agfa negative was used).

Hōryū-ji, screened in Osaka in a vibrant — and, I believe, restored — 35mm colour print, is a transitional work in Hani’s career and occupies a significant place within it, being one of the last films he made for Iwanami Productions. As scholar Marcos Centeno-Martin has pointed out, “the film keeps great consistency with Hani’s method developed in his earlier works, including shooting on location, non-professional actors, rejection of scriptwriting, and adaptation to the changing circumstances of the environment; for example, Hani and his cameraman Segawa Jun’ichi took advantage of changes in natural light to capture different tints on the coloured wood as well as the reddish walls.”
At the same time, Hōryū-ji announces and foreshadows the next phase of Hani’s filmmaking path — a career that, especially during the following decade, would profoundly influence the evolution of Japanese cinema through milestones such as Bad Boys (1961), She and He (1963), the influential Nanami: The Inferno of First Love (1969), and one of my personal favourites, Mio (1971).

Although commissioned by the National Committee for Protection of Cultural Properties, the film is almost expressionistic and experimental in style, representing a further step in the evolution of avant-garde documentary in Japan. While the film could recall — both stylistically and thematically — Les Statues meurent aussi (1953) by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, or even Matsumoto Toshio’s seminal The Song of Stone (1963) in its engagement with inanimate objects vivified through experimental music, at the time Hani was developing an alternative path to Matsumoto Toshio’s theory of avant-garde documentary. Instead of a cinema grounded primarily in the filmmaker’s subjectivity, “Hani’s interest shifted from the filmmaker’s inner world to the inner world as it manifested in the external world. In other words, Hani reflected on the possibilities of capturing subjectivities unfamiliar to the author. According to him, this could be achieved by working with subjects on whom one’s biases could not be imposed: children, animals, or even the figures found in the Hōryū-ji Temple.” (Centeno-Martin and Fortes-Guerrero 2026).

Hōryū-ji fully embodies this search for new subjectivities in the outside world. It is constructed through human faces, masks, and near-abstract shots of sculptures and architectural details, woven together through editing, lighting, and music. Screaming statues are paired with almost dodecaphonic sounds — Hani would later rework portions of the soundtrack, composed by Yashiro Akio, in Nanami: The Inferno of First Love — while more austere and hieratic figures are accompanied by solemn chants. Glimpses of the Buddhist paradise unfold alongside lighter musical passages, and the ripples of a pond carved in bas-relief are matched with delicate guitar arpeggios.
The result is a truly magnificent work, both visually and conceptually.

The Documentary Cinema of Haneda Sumiko (Routledge, 2026)

Perhaps not the best time—ongoing and looming wars are killing and disrupting the lives of thousands—but it’s nonetheless a great pleasure to announce the publication of The Documentary Cinema of Haneda Sumiko – Japan in Transition through Gender, Arts, Nature and Society. Edited by Marcos Centeno-Martin, Irene González-López, and Alejandra Armendariz-Hernandez, the volume offers an in-depth exploration of Haneda Sumiko’s career—from her early work at Iwanami Productions to her independent documentary practice, trailblazed by The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms.

I’m honored to be included in the book with an essay: Ode to Mt. Hayachine (1982). Between an End of an Era, and the Dawn of a New One: Capturing the Flow of History, a piece I could not have brought to its final form without the support and insightful feedback of the three editors, and without this webpage, which has helped me foster and develop it over the years.

On the publisher’s webpage, the volume is described as follows:

The first academic book to provide a comprehensive survey of the work of Haneda Sumiko (1926-), the first woman to regularly direct documentaries in postwar Japan, by examining her major documentaries amongst the extensive filmography she developed over sixty years. 

Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines—including film studies, gender studies, art history, eco-criticism, and aging studies—this volume explores Haneda’s depiction of critical issues in Japanese society, culture, history, and nature. It showcases how her cinema provides a personal and reflective view on Japan’s drastic transformations of the twentieth century, while her career also bore witness to changes taking place in the national cinema industry. It thus situates Haneda’s oeuvre within the history of Japanese non-fiction film whilst offering new perspectives on questions of authorship and representation.

Collectively, the chapters in this book make a case for Haneda to be recognised as a key figure in Japan’s postwar documentary scene. Bridging gaps in research on both documentary studies and women filmmakers, this will be a valuable resource to scholars and students of film studies, Japanese studies, gender studies and art history, as well as to film curators and programmers.

You can check the table of contents here.

It’s an academic book, so it’s not inexpensive—hopefully a paperback edition will be available in the near future. In the meantime, if you can, please recommend it to libraries, universities or related institutions.

In memoriam: Interview with Tony Stella

I was very shocked to hear the great artist and illustrator Tony Stella has passed away. He was not only an artist working in film posters and illustrations, but also a volcano of knowledge about international cinema, with a specific interest in Japanese films. I had the pleasure of interviewing him a couple of years ago, I still can’t believe it… he was only 45 or 46 years old…

As an homage to Tony I’ve translated the interview, but this is just a fraction of the conversation, we went on talking for hours, he was very generous and an unstoppable force when talking about movies…he will be missed.

Interview with Tony Stella
(originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto/Alias in August 2018)


Hand-painted film posters and illustrations are an art that, unfortunately, is no longer practiced today as it once was. There are, however, pockets of resistance—admittedly increasingly rare—where artists still engage in this craft. No one manages to combine artistic flair with an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema from every latitude better than Tony Stella, the nom de plume of an artist and illustrator based in Germany with Italian roots, whose fame rather unexpectedly exploded a few years ago through social media and shows no sign of slowing down. In recent years, Stella has created posters for feature films and series, as well as numerous illustrations for DVD and Blu-ray releases—a unique touch capable of shifting and adapting depending on the tone of the work and the filmmaker in question.


How did your professional journey begin?

I started out in the fine arts world, and my works sold quite well, but prices were too tied to the name, to the “brand,” too dependent, so to speak, on market fluctuations. The turning point for me came during my stay in Japan. I lived in Kitakyushu for a year and a half; there, the entire international art world was magnified, and one couldn’t really go against the system. But I realized that this path wasn’t viable for me—I needed more creative freedom. Moreover, I wanted, and still want, my work to speak for me rather than my persona. I’m not interested in the name or in my personal figure. I started with graffiti on the streets—graffiti being, in a way, an anonymous art form—and perhaps everything stems from there.

During the time when I was painting professionally, I always continued—almost as a parallel passion—to draw film-related posters and illustrations for myself. Over nearly twenty years, purely out of passion and long before putting my work online, I had already created more than 600 posters and 2,000 drawings inspired by films, scenes, actors, and so on.


From your work and your podcast appearances, one can see an incredible knowledge of cinema—high and low, from art cinema to genre films, from Italian to Japanese cinema, from martial arts films to those of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill. Where does this passion come from?

I grew up with a group of friends for whom cinema was our shared language. The mother of one of my friends had a film distribution company here in Germany, and whenever we visited her house—after roaming the city doing graffiti—there were always films playing and videocassettes everywhere. Personally, I liked owning VHS tapes of my favorite films so I could watch them over and over again, and I also enjoyed customizing them by creating covers for them. In a way, on a different scale, that’s what I still do today.

When I was working in the fine arts world, people often asked me why I didn’t incorporate my passion for cinema into my paintings, but I always refused because I didn’t want to spoil that passion—I wanted to keep the two things separate.


How do you usually create your posters and drawings? Where do you start?

When I rewatch a film I like—even just a short clip—if I manage to perceive something new that strikes me, I start sketching instinctively. Those initial sketches then evolve into something more complete, so when a commission comes in, I already have material to work from.


All your works are hand-painted, correct?

Yes, of course. I use various techniques, often mixed. For example, if it’s an older film with a distinctive artistic cinematography, I might choose oil painting. If I’m working on a classic Japanese film, I might use ink or watercolors. Ultimately, it depends on the tone I want to give the work; I also use pastels or charcoal. In this sense, my teacher was my grandfather, who painted with whatever he could find—he experimented constantly. Using different techniques is also a way for me to disappear behind my work and let the film speak through the illustration or poster. It ties back to what I was saying about graffiti: in the early days, before being influenced by the ego-driven culture of hip hop, graffiti was appreciated for being recognizable yet anonymous—the identity of the artist wasn’t important.


Are there any artists you admire, in cinema or art more generally, who inspired you?

Above all, Tintoretto. When I visited Venice as a child, I was left speechless in front of his works—I couldn’t believe a human being had painted them. Probably also Giacometti; I appreciated his personality, restrained even in being a great artist. Then, when I became more interested in posters and illustrations, artists like Bob Peak and Robert McGinnis, Studio Favalli, Enrico De Seta, and the entire Roman school.


Your “success” came only recently, right?

Yes, although as a painter, as I mentioned, I was fairly appreciated at the beginning. But then everything came to a halt, driven by my unhappiness and dissatisfaction with the situation I was in. The beginning of my career as a poster artist and illustrator came when I was on vacation in Sardinia visiting a friend and feeling very low. I didn’t know which professional path to take, and this friend, seeing my passion for cinema, suggested putting my posters and illustrations online. Without telling me, he even uploaded some of my works on Tumblr. Then I discovered Twitter, and everything grew from there.


What was the first major or important commission you were asked to do?

There have been many, but one interaction I remember very fondly is when I received praise from William Friedkin for creating the original illustration for the vinyl soundtrack of Sorcerer.


Recently, you also created posters and illustrations for the miniseries The Underground Railroad by Barry Jenkins.

Yes, I had already collaborated with him on the cover of the soundtrack for If Beale Street Could Talk. For The Underground Railroad, he supported me a lot in dealing with Amazon, pushing for my drawings to be used without being altered or made more commercial. He wanted the poster and illustrations to be a form of art that communicated something about the series, not just simple advertising.


I’ve seen that you recently posted many drawings and posters about Columbo.

During the pandemic, many people rediscovered Columbo, and those drawings are part of a project related to a book about the series and the character that unfortunately never materialized. More generally—not only for Columbo—I have an enormous amount of material, hundreds of drawings and illustrations, and I don’t have the time needed to select and scan the originals. It’s a huge job that maybe one day someone will do for me.


Is there anything upcoming that you can talk about?

There are a couple of projects with well-known figures that I can’t talk about yet. But paradoxically, what I’m most looking forward to is having some time for myself to return to drawing. For me, it’s a kind of therapy, and it helps me maintain a sense of calm.

Militant (video)cinema, an Italian perspective: Videobase

When I started this website, I thought of it as a space for documentary cinema in Japan, and later opened it up to include non-fiction films from Southeast Asia as well. Today though, I’m taking a bit of a detour to put together some scattered thoughts on the Italian collective Videobase, perhaps as a first step toward a longer, more in-depth essay one day…

“In order for the videos to be watched, videotape recorders had to be plugged into a television set. This enacted an occupation of the television screen that symbolically disrupted the state’s monopoly of the two television channels” Jacopo Galimberti, Images of Class

I came across Videobase while reading about Italian Operaismo and Autonomia, and at the same time while looking for examples of militant video works in 1970s Japan. Surprisingly not that many, even though it was the decade when the portable videotape recorders (Sony Portapak, Akai, etc. ironically almost all made in Japan) gave artists and collectives a new tool to experiment and explore with. 

Videobase was formed in 1971 through the collaboration of Anna Lajolo and Guido Lombardi—already a duo active in experimental cinema in the past decade —together with Alfredo Leonardi, who likewise emerged from the Italian underground scene. As scholar Christian Uva has pointed out, the collective, while not the first to use videotape recorders, can be considered the first to have used the new technology for militant purposes in a systematic way, grounded in a clear theoretical understanding of the medium. 

For the group, their collective activity was “an electronic extension of that form of interventionist and documentary cinema known as militant cinema” one that kept and intensified the difference with the mainstream output. As they recollect in the 1990s “that very sense of incompleteness and formal roughness created and defined a difference; they were reclaimed, through a widespread spontaneism, as qualities—a dirty, anti-bourgeois style set against a power that produced images—broadly speaking—polished and beautiful.”

A video(cinema) against the grain that aimed to choose a clear part on the barricades “to take sides for us, was a deliberate choice, a way of engaging with reality without distorting it—one defined by social figures that today appear blurred: the proletariat and the subproletariat. There was the risk of bias, but everything was laid out in the open. In contrast to a public television—and later a commercial one—that disguised, and still disguises, itself as impartial.”

I’ve seen some of their works, including those shot on film during the same period, which, in my view, remain in clear continuity with their video output. However, I haven’t been able to track down two of their most significant works from the late 1970s, Porto Marghera, il lavoro contro la vita (Porto Marghera, Work Against Life, 1979) and L’isola dell’isola (The Island’s Island, 1974–77). I’ve seen the second part of the latter, which is often regarded as the most complete embodiment of Videobase’s (video)philosophy, at least in regards to creating a new form of video and “television” that was more participatory and circular. Here, previously shot footage is, so to speak, reframed and presented again to the same participants—not only to elicit discussion and reactions, but also to foster a deeper awareness of the representational apparatus at work within the contemporary mediascape.

Still from L’Isola dell’isola (1974-1977)

As I’ve done in the past, I’ve jotted down a series of scattered thoughts that may eventually coalesce into something more fluid and systematic, once I’ve had the chance to engage with the entirety of Videobase’s output.

La casa è un diritto non un privilegio (Housing is a Right, not a Privilege, 1970) “Our first work together was a 16 mm film about the slum dwellers and evictees of Rome, shot for Unitelefilm. It was a collective film, with group direction and discussion during the editing. Working this way, we had the opportunity to evaluate the work through discussion at all levels, including ideological ones.” (Anna Lajolo, Guido Lombardi, 1974)

Il fitto dei padroni non lo paghiamo più (We’re Not Paying the Owners’ Rent Anymore, 1972) the result of 10 months spent by Videobase’s members in the Magliana neighborhood and its committee is also their second work shot on video. 

& Là il cielo e la terra si univano, là le stagioni si ricongiungevano, là il vento e la pioggia si univano (& There, sky and earth merged, there, seasons rejoined, there, wind and rain united, 1972) stands as a fascinating, radical, and rigorously constructed example of militant cinema. It weaves together interviews with social outsiders—exploited workers, former partisans, ex-prisoners, the disenfranchised—with passages of landscape filmmaking, all bound by a forceful Marxist critique of the city, capital, the state, trade unions, socialism, and the bourgeoisie. In its attention to the heterogeneous subjects it brings on screen, the work also operates as a compelling illustration of Mario Tronti’s concept of class composition, captured here in the very process of its formation.
Formally, the film is built largely around long-take interviews, staged either inside old houses or outdoors against the backdrop of an ancient urban landscape. As mentioned, it is shot on 16mm from an elevated vantage point—perhaps a hill or even a castle—from which the camera frequently pans laterally, gradually revealing the surrounding terrain and embedding the speakers within a broader spatial and historical context.
The interviews are framed—both opened and closed—by sequences in which the group stages discussions about their experiences and their vision of the future. These moments feel almost theatrical and re-enacted, yet they reinforce the collective dimension of the project: revolution and the seizure of power by the proletariat as a shared horizon.
The ending is especially striking. After a succession of politically charged statements, the group disperses, each person leaving the hill and returning to their own path—an image that resonates as both a fragmentation and a continuation of the collective struggle just articulated.

Carcere in Italia (Prisons in Italy, 1973, according to the description given by the authors themselves, is the “recording of the revolt of prisoners barricaded on the roofs of Regina Coeli during the five-hour assault on the prison by the police and Carabinieri on the afternoon of July 28, 1973.”
However, this work is much more than a document of an event, as it also includes long theoretical reflections on the countless difficulties awaiting prisoners once released (usually determined by class divide), a short segment featuring the wife of a detainee and her child speaking with him from outside the prison walls, and, above all, a deeply moving interview that opens and closes the work—20 minutes shot in a single long take in dim light—in which an inmate recalls how he has been incarcerated since the age of nineteen and recounts the brutal beatings he repeatedly suffered at the hands of prison guards. A powerful example of how video militancy gave space to subaltern voices. 

Still from Lottando la vita – Lavoratori italiani a Berlino

Lottando la vita – Lavoratori italiani a Berlino (Fighting life – Italian Workers in Berlin, 1975) was made during a three-month residency in Berlin in 1975 on a grant from the Artists-in-Berlin Program. The work is centered on the living and working conditions of Italian migrant laborers in Berlin in 1975. This is one of Videobase’s works which better embodies the shift from militant cinema to militant video, exploring the possibilities offered by the new medium. The two major advantages video recorders brought with their advent were the ability to shoot for longer periods of time, and the possibility of playing what was shot almost immediately.
One exemplary moment encapsulates this transition and what it entails: we see and hear a worker describing the conditions faced by foreign laborers in Berlin and the role of the unions. In the following sequence, another comrade watches that testimony on a television set and comments on it. The image we have just seen is immediately re-mediated, reframed, and collectively discussed.

Not only it highlights the dialogical effect and power of the video within a video, but it points towards an epochal shift. The struggle moves from the cinema hall to the domestic screen: audiovisual militancy no longer relies on the theatrical space as its primary channel of expression; instead, it symbolically “occupies” what was then the medium of power par excellence—television. Videobase would push to the extreme this use of the remediated and reframed images through television sets in the aforementioned L’isola dell’isola (The island’s island) shot between 1974 and 1977 in the small island of San Pietro, Sardinia.

The extended recording time is put to striking use in Lavoratori italiani a Berlino in a fascinating scene where a group of young workers lounge around, half-asleep and half-dressed, chatting freely. The camera—as researcher Christian Uva notes “positioned as if it were one of them in the center of the room”—lingers on them allowing their conversation to unfold with an unusual sense of ease and intimacy.
Another important element that permeates this work is the dense layering of dialects and accents, which subtly reveals the diverse regions of Italy these migrant workers came from. At the same time, many of them lost the ability to speak fluently in their own language, and were not able to master the new one (German). A symbolic and real disorientation, expressing an identity in crisis when not in flux. 

Bibliography:

Anna Lajolo, Alfredo Leonardi, Guido Lombardi. L’isola dell’isola – Videobase, in Bianco e Nero settembre/dicembre, 1979, Edizioni dell’ateneo & bizzarri, 1979.

Galimberti, Jacopo. Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988), Verso, 2022.

Christian Uva. L’immagine politica: Forme del contropotere tra cinema, video e fotografia nell’Italia degli anni Settanta, Mimesis, 2015.

Taiwan International Documentary Festival 2026 (May 1-10) – preview

An embarrassment of riches awaits at this year’s Taiwan International Documentary Festival (May 1–10), now in its fifteenth edition. While the full programme, with its three major competitions—the Asian Vision Competition, International Competition, and Taiwan Competition—is well worth exploring in its entirety, I would like to highlight a few special sections that particularly caught my attention.

Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive examines how the scattered filmography of a people—subjected to decades of violence and now facing the threat of genocide—can itself become a form of resistance. This resistance unfolds not only through images, but also against them, as several experimental works here presented reflect on the entanglement between images and the construction of narratives of oppression. Notable examples include A Stone’s Throw (2024) by Razan Alsalah—one of my favorite documentaries of last year—The Diary of a Sky (2024) by the always engaging Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and A Fidai Film (2024) by Kamal Aljafari.

Another major highlight is Sensible but Unsayable — A Retrospective of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, a group whose distinctive aesthetic has profoundly shaped the trajectory of non-fiction cinema over the past fifteen years. The programme brings together twelve films, encompassing many of their key formal experiments, including the widely acclaimed Leviathan (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. Among the selections, I would especially recommend De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), also by the duo, and especially Expedition Content by Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati, which stands, in my view, as a defining work in the recent history of audiovisual practices.

Among the programmes featuring films I have not yet seen—but am particularly eager to—Reel Taiwan: The Late 1980s on Film stands out. If the late 1980s marked a period of profound social transformation and upheaval—the lifting of Martial Law in 1987 being a decisive turning point—it was also a moment of technological transition, as film began to give way to videotape and, eventually, digital media.
Framed by this dual shift, the programme presents four works by Lee Daw-ming and Hu Tai-li—the latter author of Voices of Orchid Island—, two filmmakers whose practice developed alongside—but distinct from—the more action-oriented Green Team (on which I have written at length elsewhere). Rather than engaging directly with sites of confrontation and resistance, their films—while maintaining a clear political stance—approach these issues from broader historical perspectives or through attention to marginalized communities, all while continuing to work on film. The four works included in the programme are:

Beyond the Killing Fields: Refugees on the Thai-Cambodian Border (Lee Daw-ming, 1986)
Songs of Pasta’ay (Hu Tai-li & Lee Daw-ming, 1988)
Beyond the Anti-DuPont Movement: Portraits of Some Social Activists (Lee Daw-ming, 1990)
Voice of the People (Lee Daw-ming, 1991)

It is also nice to see an homage to the late Tomonari Nishikawa, an experimental filmmaker whose work is featured in Stranger Than Documentary, a program highlighting cross-disciplinary approaches to nonfiction cinema, alongside the world premiere of the Public Television Service (PTS) production Water in the Balance by Ke Chin-yuan, and a well-deserved tribute to filmmaker Peter Watkins with a screening of Punishment Park (1971).

Aura and the Optical Unconscious in Satō Makoto’s writings

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Dokyumentarii eiga no chihei: sekai o hihanteki ni uketomeru tame ni (The Horizon of Documentary Film: Toward a Critical Understanding of the World, 2001) by Satō Makoto, followed by a brief comment of my own. I believe that (re)discovering Satō’s writings is just as important as watching his films, as the two are often closely connected—if not reflections of one another.
Disclaimer: as for Haneda Sumiko’s writings, please keep in mind that neither English or Japanese is my first language, and that I’m not a professional translator. The following translation should be considered as an approximation. 
A couple of further notes: I have used alternatively moving images or image for the term eizō (映像). As for the Benjamin’s passages quoted by Satō, I used the English translation by Harry Zohn (1969) for the longest quotes, but I kept the Japanese version used by Satō (translated by me in English) for other, shorter, sentences. 

The aura captured by images

Let us call that which clings to images, something beyond words, aura. The term aura is one of the central concepts in Benjamin’s theory of art, employed when critiquing the visual arts in the age of mechanical reproduction. It signifies a certain subtle veil surrounding the genuine and original qualities once possessed by art.

According to Benjamin, aura is defined as “the uniqueness peculiar to the work of art, its ‘here’ and ‘now’,” and the resulting “one-time phenomenon that evokes a distant remoteness, however close it may be” (Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction1). He criticized the new mass culture, arguing that this uniqueness, present in painting and theater, is destroyed by the reproductive arts of photography and film. However, Benjamin’s critique of the reproducible arts is not merely a lament over the loss of an artwork’s uniqueness and the disappearance of aura due to the rise of reproduction. He was trying to find a new aura within the emerging visual arts of photography and film, which were still considered dubious at the time.

Regarding cinema, then in its nascent phase, he presented an ambivalent view: it could be both a destroyer of artistic tradition and a revolutionary critique.
Indeed, cinema fragmented the totality and uniqueness of a stage actor’s performance into “a series of individual episodes that could be pieced together later.” Yet, it also created the opportunity for “anyone, under certain circumstances, to appear within an artistic work.”

“Compared with painting, it is the infinitely more detailed presentation of the situation that gives the performance portrayed on the screen its greater analysability. Compared with live theatre, the greater analysability of the performance portrayed cinematically is due to a higher degree of isolatability. That fact (and this is its chief significance) tends to foster the interpenetration of art and science. Indeed, in connection with a piece of behaviour embedded in a specific situation and now (like a muscle from a cadaver) neatly dissected out, it can scarcely be said which is more gripping: its artistic worth or its scientific usefulness.” (Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)

The faithful reproduction inherent in film—akin to an “optical test”—is the path to creating a new form of this art of reproduction. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin further argues that this scientific power of representation expands the “world of unconscious vision2” for human beings.

I believe that the moving images are the optimal medium for capturing the unique radiance inherent in the ephemeral nature of life—a quality that transcends linguistic expression and might be called the unconscious, or aura.
However, this is only true when fragments of captured reality are made into works without being forced into words, themes, or formulaic thinking.
The majority of mass media images circulating in society are selected and categorized merely as materials necessary to support stereotypical narratives. Looking only at this aspect, one could certainly say that it is indeed the reproducible art that has robbed us of the aura—the beauty of the unique “here and now.”

Satō Makoto,ドキュメンタリー映画の地平: 世界を批判的に受けとめるために (Dokyumentarii eiga no chihei: sekai o hihanteki ni uketomeru tame ni), Gaifū-sha, 2001, pp 21-22.

The passage translated above is part of the opening chapter of Satō’s major theoretical work, where the filmmaker outlines his understanding of documentary cinema while examining a wide range of non-fiction films from Japan and beyond. The passage comes after a section distinguishing documentary from journalism, and is followed by a discussion of propaganda films produced during the Pacific War. There, Satō observes that even after the war, documentary filmmaking did not fundamentally transform: it remained largely structured around a central “message” to be conveyed to the viewers and shaped by a kind of formulaic thinking. At the same time, however, he points out that, even in the most programmatic or message-driven works, something invariably exceeds the filmmaker’s original intent. This surplus—produced by the very act of mechanically recording reality—emerges through the images themselves, revealing meanings that escape the imposed framework.

Following Walter Benjamin’s writings, Satō links the possibility of a new kind of aura in the moving image to the notion of the “world of unconscious vision” or “optical unconscious” as often the German term optisch-unbewusste is translated. This concept, first introduced by Benjamin in his 1931 essay Little History of Photography, designates the capacity of photographic—and, by extension, cinematic—images to reveal dimensions of reality that remain inaccessible to ordinary perception. As Benjamin famously writes: “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

Aura and the optical unconscious are concepts to which Walter Benjamin would return on multiple occasions throughout his writings. As Arianne Conty observes, Benjamin “retains and develops another conception of the aura—understood through the key of the optical unconscious that is enabled by the very forms of technology that cause the decline of the cult status of the image. Technological media allows for an image of the past, lost to our conscious mind and lost to the history constructed by the victors, to surge into view. It is the unconscious eye of the camera that elicits a response and reveals the configuration of the present hidden in a snapshot of the past.”

I believe that the exploration of how past and present reconfigure themselves into something new—through the reuse of old, defective, or otherwise unused images—constitutes a central thread throughout Satō’s filmmaking practice. This tendency is already visible, for instance, in The Brightness of the Day a.k.a. I Want the Sun (1995), a work he conceived and edited, but it emerges with particular intensity toward the end of his life, most notably in Memories of Agano (2005).

By reusing past images—often shot in different formats—allowing them to “ferment” over time, and shifting his attention away from central figures favouring the opaque background, Satō enables these images to open up and acquire new meanings. This approach of waiting for the images to reveal themselves creates the conditions for the optical unconscious to emerge, echoing Walter Benjamin’s notion of “a past not ordinarily accessible to the waking self” something that “entails a passivity in which something ‘takes possession of us’ rather than vice versa”.

Bibliography/Filmography:

Benjamin Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 1-26.

Benjamin Walter, Little History of Photography, in Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934, Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 507-530.

Benjamin Walter, L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica – Tre versioni (1936-39), a cura di Fabrizio Desideri, Donzelli Edizioni, 2012. 

Conty Arianne, They Have Eyes That They Might Not See: Walter Benjamin’s Aura and the Optical Unconscious, in Literature & Theology, Vol. 27. No. 4, December 2013, pp. 472–486.

Memories of Agano 阿賀の記憶 (Satō Makoto, 2005)

Satō Makoto, Dokyumentarii eiga no chihei: sekai o hihanteki ni uketomeru tame ni, Gaifū-sha, 2001, pp.  21-22.

Satō Makoto, Aga ni ikiru’ kara ‘Aga no kiōku’ e, in Dokyumentarii no shūjigaku. Misuzu Shobo, 2005. 

The Brightness of the Day a.k.a. I Want the Sun おてんとうさまがほしい (1995), shot by Watanabe Shō, edited by Satō Makoto.

  1.  There are four versions of Benjamin’s essay—three in German and one in French, translated by Pierre Klossowski—the latter being the only version published during Benjamin’s lifetime. I’m not sure which version was used for the Japanese translation Satō read. ↩︎
  2. 無意識的な視覚 (muishiki teki na shikaku) is Benjamin’s Optisch-Unbewusste (optical unconscious) here and often translated into English also as “unconscious vision”. ↩︎

What Should We Have Done? (Fujino Tomoaki, 2024)

What Should We Have Done? was one of the most commercially successful independent documentaries released in Japanese theaters last year, earning more than 180 million yen after its initial release in December 2024, and remaining in cinemas for almost a year. The film directed by Fujino Tomoaki was also included in Kinema Junpo’s Best Bunka Eiga list for 2025, where it ranked second. Now What Should We Have Done? is again being screened in selected mini-theaters across the archipelago, giving me the chance to revisit it.

Produced by Fujino’s Zou-Shima, distributed in Japan by Tofoo Films, and completed with the support of Yamagata Dojo, a residency program for documentary filmmakers working on projects in progress, the film is built from video material—mostly shot digitally by the director himself over more than twenty years within his own family. These visual footage was recorded intermittently during his visits to the parents house, and traces the story of the director’s older sister, nicknamed Mako-chan or Mako, who suffered from mental illness, and of parents who, for almost her entire life, denied her condition and attempted to deal with it while almost never consulting a doctor.

Watching it for the second time gave me the chance to notice and appreciate things that, the first time around, were somewhat drowned out by the raw intensity of the experience. It was still a painful, heavy watch—perhaps even more piercing in some ways.
As Fujino has stated on various occasions, What Should We Have Done? is, from its very title, a document of a failure: the failure of an entire family—director included—toward his sister Mako, who began showing symptoms of schizophrenia in 1983, when she was 24. After allegedly consulting a specialist, the parents came to the conclusion that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her, and the family was discouraged from seeking psychiatric care for their daughter.

The film begins on a black screen, with the sister’s voice out of control, recorded by her brother on a Walkman in 1992. The video recordings started almost ten years later, in 2001, during the visits the director—now living in Kanagawa—made back home in Sapporo, Hokkaido. He began documenting his sister’s life and her relationship with their parents as a way of opposing and criticizing their treatment and decisions regarding her.

The use of low-resolution video feels absolutely right for conveying Mako’s miserable experience and, secondarily, that of the entire family. The rough texture of the images almost mirrors the emotional conditions in which everyone is trapped. On a filmmaking level, the documentary works largely thanks to the editing, which naturally shapes what the film ultimately becomes: a partial but real point of view on the tragic reality of the family. It must have been a near-Promethean task for Fujino and Asano Yumiko, who edited the film with the support of Hata Takeshi, to decide what to include, and especially when to cut away from some of the most distressing moments.

The structure, in this regard, is exemplary. The first part briefly sketches Mako’s life and that of her parents using photographs and home movies shot by the father in the early 1960s during their trip, for business, around the world. The couple was highly educated, both were researchers, and made the whole situation even more astonishing.
The film then moves forward chronologically, covering more than a decade beginning in 2001 and documenting the steady deterioration of Mako’s condition—and, alongside it, that of her parents. One day the director returns home and finds a padlock on the front door, installed by the parents so that Mako cannot escape. We learn, together with an appalled brother, that his sister has not left the house for almost a year.

The emotional peak of the documentary—and what must have been the lowest point in the relationship between daughter and parents, at least the one kept in the film—comes in a nighttime scene in which we realize that the mother, too, is beginning to show signs of dementia, while Mako’s piercing, bone-chilling screams fill the house.

The following scene—a black screen with written text—tells us that the parents finally gave up, and that Mako was hospitalized and given the appropriate medication.
The contrast between those unbearable screams and the later scene in which she calmly speaks, cooks, and washes the dishes is both astonishing and heartbreaking. It points toward what might have been—and that makes it all the more painful. 
The final part of the film is filled with tender, almost peaceful moments between the father, Mako, and her brother—and then with the inevitable ending, which I will not spoil.
An interesting layer is added when Fujino speaks with his father—now frail and in a wheelchair in a hospital—telling him about his wish to assemble all the footage shot over the past two decades and essentially asking, on camera, for his consent to do so.