Category: documentary

Idemitsu Mako What a Woman Made (2026)/part 5 – The Past Ahead

This is the last entry in my coverage of the exhibition (here Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4)

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)

photo’s source here

The Past Ahead (2004)
I chose to end my coverage with this installation partly because it was located towards the end of the exhibition, but also because it was the work that resonated with me the most. Its compelling formal structure, the themes it explores, and the way it brings Idemitsu’s career full circle make it a fitting culmination of her artistic journey.
The Past Ahead consists of two screens positioned some distance from one another. The screen closest to the viewer is transparent, allowing the eye to see through it to the second screen in the background. The result is a double exposure effect done in a physical space, a kind of three-dimensional superimposition.
In addition to the two screens, the images projected onto the transparent screen are also cast onto the floor in the space between the two projections (see the photo above).

The screen in the foreground presents photographs and other images of Idemitsu’s family from the wartime years, during the early 1940s, while the screen behind it projects footage documenting the Japanese Empire’s military campaigns during the same period. Images of corpses, warships firing their guns, and aircraft carrying war across Asia are interwoven with excerpts from other films. Among them, I recognized scenes from Kami Fumio’s Fighting Soldiers, as well as clips from a documentary about the so-called “comfort women,” although I cannot recall the title.

If video and video art, as we have seen in the previous entries, possess the ability to capture and generate multiple temporalities, and if Idemitsu made full use of these possibilities throughout her works of the 1980s and 1990s, then this installation represents the culmination of her exploration of interweaving temporal flows.
The key innovation Idemitsu introduces here is the incorporation of personal material, although this was already present, to some extent, in her earlier installation Real? Motherhood. Above all, however, the work offers a fierce critique of what her family, and her father in particular, represented within a Japanese society structured around patriarchal authority. It is worth remembering that Mako’s father, Sazō, in 1911 founded Idemitsu Kōsan, currently the second-largest petroleum company in Japan. He was a dominating and controlling figure and when his daughter decided to pursue a career in the arts and marry in the United States, he disowned her.

The problematic relationship with her father runs throughout Idemitsu’s career, but what distinguishes The Past Ahead is the way his figure is elevated into a symbol of patriarchy, male supremacy, and its connection to the violence of war and imperialism. The horrors of war and the violence perpetrated by the state, the artist seems to suggest, have their origins in the familial nucleus itself, they are already embedded in the very structure of the “traditional” family.

The effect of these two worlds, these two temporalities, overlapping before our eyes is mesmerizing. On one screen, we see the peaceful lives of Idemitsu’s family; on the other, the horrors produced by the imperial machine operating at full force. The contrast speaks of class divide, privilege, sexism, oligarchic power, and the exploitation of the most vulnerable. It evokes a past that, as the title suggests, is very much still ahead of us.

This contrast is amplified by the zooms into the family photographs, but also by the subtle movement of the images themselves, as if the screen were a curtain stirred by the wind. In some sections, the photographs drift out of focus, almost guiding our gaze toward the second screen behind them.

The complex sonic landscape, composed of two channels, is another of the main reasons why The Past Ahead is such a powerful and affecting work. The images on the first screen are accompanied by soft, ambient-like music, while those projected on the second screen are paired with static noise and voices of military personnel, often distorted and slowed down to create an even more unsettling effect.
終

SAPPORO WINTER OLYMPICS (Shinoda Masahiro, 1972)

The summer special on sport and cinema I’m working on with my friends at Sonatine gave me the chance to revisit Ichikawa Kon’s Tokyo Olympiad (1965) last week, and today I turned to Shinoda Masahiro’s Sapporo Winter Olympics, a fascinating documentary in its own right.

I’m posting here the English version. Please keep in mind that, while slightly modified, this is a more traditional review in style, so to speak, and it might read differently from the pieces I usually publish here.

After two landmark events in Japan’s postwar history, the 1964 Olympics and the 1970 Osaka Expo, another major international event took place on the Japanese archipelago just a few years later. The 1972 Winter Olympics shifted attention northward, introducing Sapporo and Hokkaidō to the world. To document the event, the organisers called upon Shinoda Masahiro, at the time one of the leading figures of the so-called New Wave, directors who had revolutionised Japanese cinema from the 1960s onward.

In Shinoda’s documentary, the solemnity and formality of the Tokyo Games and Ichikawa’s film give way to an international atmosphere with an almost provincial charm—one shaped by the director and his staff primarily through a fascinating approach to sound. Downhill skiing, ski jumping, figure skating, speed skating, and luge are among the winter sports featured in the film, which also lingers on snow-covered landscapes, mountains, lakes, and snow—lots of snow.

Inevitably, Sapporo Winter Olympics is often compared to Kon Ichikawa’s 1965 documentary. The comparison stems not only from the fact that both films were directed by major auteur filmmakers—Ichikawa representing the old guard, while Shinoda the new wave—but also because they document two landmark international sporting events held in Japan less than a decade apart.

The two films, however, take markedly different approaches, largely because they portray very different sporting events. While today the Winter Olympics have grown into a massive international spectacle, fifty years ago they still retained a relatively modest scale. Shinoda emphasizes this almost provincial quality from the opening sequences, recalling the controversy surrounding Austrian skier Karl Schranz and his sponsorship deals. At the time, athletes were not allowed to wear clothing displaying commercial logos, and the incident became one of the defining disputes of the Games. The film’s more relaxed and informal atmosphere is also shaped by Shinoda’s stylistic choices, many of them suggested by the very nature of the winter sports themselves. His compositions consistently highlight the surrounding mountains, while the athletes compete against the snow-covered landscapes of Hokkaidō, turning the natural environment into a constant presence and almos a character throughout the documentary. 

This almost matsuri-like atmosphere is already evident during the opening ceremony, where the diegetic music is performed by a brass band, but it emerges most clearly through Shinoda’s editing and directorial choices in the rest of the film. A telling example is the way he portrays Emperor Hirohito, who had also opened the Tokyo Games eight years earlier. His brief speech is presented here almost in its entirety, including its pauses and hesitations, details that render him surprisingly human, stripping away much of the institutional solemnity that typically surrounds his public image.

Watching the documentary, one has the impression of witnessing an international event that still retains an accessible, almost intimate quality at times. A good example is the men’s ski jumping competition, which ended in a historic Japanese clean sweep. Shinoda shows the athletes walking back up the long slope on foot, and, during a brief lull, one of the skiers is casually seen smoking a cigarette, an image almost unimaginable in contemporary sport. It not only reinforces the film’s relaxed tone but also highlights how profoundly the world of elite sport has changed over the past fiftyfive years. 

One of the documentary’s greatest strengths is the way its form continually adapts to the sports it depicts, not only through its images but also, as we have mentioned, through its remarkable sound design. Downhill skiing, slalom, biathlon, speed skating, luge, and ice hockey are accompanied by a richly layered soundscape in which the murmur of spectators and officials, conversations in different languages, and, at times, even the voices of the athletes themselves merge with the scrape of skate blades on ice, the hiss of skis cutting through fresh snow, or the luge hurtling down the track with a missile-like whistle. Rather than simply documenting the competitions—which are shown only in fragments—Shinoda immerses the viewer in their sonic environment. 

Another interesting choice is the decision to use two voices for the narration: a male voice, more informative in tone, and that of actress Kishida Kyōko, whose delivery moves between descriptive passages and moments of almost poetic intensity. The music, composed by Masaru Satō, further contributes to the film’s distinctive identity. At several points, it evokes the soundtracks of 1960s spy films (James Bond!), while the theme accompanying the opening title recalls the famous fanfares associated with Tōei films. 

On a musical level, Shinoda also incorporates the sound of the mukkuri, a traditional Ainu instrument similar to a jaw’s harp, in several sequences of the documentary. This is a significant detail, recalling that Sapporo and Hokkaidō as a whole are territories that were inhabited by the Ainu people for thousands of years before being colonized and incorporated into the Japanese state in relatively recent history. Without explicitly dwelling on this past, the film allows a memory of the place to emerge through music, silently surfacing alongside the narrative of the sporting event. 

Evocative and perfectly in tune with the documentary’s overall tone in its idiosyncrasy is the ending. While images of the closing ceremony appear on screen, a conversation with ski jumper Kasaya Yukio is heard. Asked, “Do you feel anxious about returning to normal society?”, he replies, “I feel fear.” The film responds to these words with a succession of still frames dedicated to the various Olympic disciplines, accompanied by a harsh, experimental musical score. The images then give way to an aerial shot of the Olympic facilities, slowly receding into the distance, as an orchestral composition replaces the earlier abrasive sounds.

Idemitsu Mako What a Woman Made (2026)/part 3

Continuing my articles about the exhibition, Part 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

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 3

“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

Yoji, What’s Wrong With You? (1987) video
Of of Idemitsu’s best works. A Brechtian family psychodrama where absurdity reigns. Television screens function as magnifying lenses, enlarging and externalising the protagonists’ inner lives. The relationship between mother and son unfolds in a surreal, almost comical, and at times perverse register (as in the scene where the mother gazes at a monitor showing her son’s naked body), while the characters speak largely through clichés and stock phrases.
While the central narrative revolves around a mother struggling with the gradual loss of her connection to her son, and the prospect of old age, the simple mise-en-scène, and especially the pervasive presence of television screens (here arranged in more playful and unconventional ways than in Idemitsu’s earlier works) also turns the video into an almost X-ray-like examination and deconstruction of the social roles and expectations internalised by women in Japanese society.
Television monitors as a Cronenbergian and Ballardian materialization women’s dreams, memories, unrealized aspirations, fears, and desires…


Grandmother, Mother, Daughter (1976) was displayed at the exhibition entrance on three TV monitors stacked in a column. In the piece, Idemitsu’s grandmother, mother, and daughter each appears in one screen with several packs of cigarettes, improvising and playfully interacting with them.
Women’s labor as captured and controlled by cameras?
First installation by Idemitsu and possibly the first instance in which she used monitors inside the frame, at least the first on video.

Animus Part 2 (1982) video
Another work inspired by Idemitsu’s fascination with women performing on stage. This time, Neo-Dada artist Kishimoto Sayako performs Messenger from Hell in Idemitsu’s living room. Over the footage, the filmmaker overlays an image of a pantomime figure in a yellow suit, and an oversized face. The work also includes English narration that does not fully translate Kishimoto’s words and carries a slightly ironic tone.
Kishimoto’s fierce performance brought to mind the avant-garde theater of the 1970s. The title, Animus, refers to the Jungian concept of the masculine side of the female psyche. Kishimoto was a fascinating artist.

Make Up (1978) video
Idemitsu is doing her make-up and uses a monitor as a mirrow.
Video as a make-up, a distortion, but also a revealing tool for self-awareness, and at the same time anticipating today’s obsession with one’s own image as continuosly reflected by contemporary mediascape (smartphone’s selfies, social media, etc.)


At Yukigawa 3 (1979) 16mm
Everyday scenes of Idemitsu’s mother and the artist herself are intercut with images of the gardens surrounding their houses in Yukigaya and Aobadai, accompanied by Chopin piano music.
The editing is fast, alternating between interior spaces, where the mother sits at a table eating and drinking, and shots of trees gently swaying in the garden. Occasionally, the voices of children can be heard in the background.

Housewives and a Day (1979) video
This was one of the highlights of the exhibition for me. While extremely simple in both structure and execution, it gradually acquires new layers of meaning as it unfolds.
Four housewives, living in Idemitsu’s neighbourhood, gather around a table with a floor plan of a typical house placed in front of them. Using the map as a guide, they reconstruct their daily routine, recalling what they did and where they went the previous day.
Through this simple setup, the women trace their movements around the house while chatting freely and cheerfully about yesterday’s chores, often struggling to remember the exact sequence of their actions. At a certain point, the floor plan is replaced by a map of the surrounding neighbourhood as they describe going grocery shopping, picking up their children from school, returning home, and heading back out again to run more errands.
Beyond documenting their routines and movements, the video creates an opportunity for these women to talk about their everyday lives and give voice to experiences that usually remain invisible or unspoken. As the work progresses, it increasingly becomes a space for sharing and solidarity among housewives (it should be noted that the women all appear to belong to the middle class). The exhibition catalogue describes the work as an experiment reminiscent of sandplay therapy, one that gradually fostered greater self-awareness among the four participants.
The use of video technology also plays a crucial role in shaping the work. If I’m not mistaken, the piece consists of a single continuous take, or perhaps just two, and this technical choice informs both its aesthetic and the way its themes emerge.

Tokyo Olympiad (Ichikawa Kon, 1965)

The summer special on sport and cinema I’m working on with my friends at Sonatine gave me the chance to revisit Ichikawa Kon’s Tokyo Olympiad (1965), a spectacle-documentary that revolutionised the way sports films were made, though not without its issues—especially those linked to the production context behind the film.

I’m posting here the English version. Please keep in mind that, while slightly modified, this is a more traditional review in style, so to speak, and it might read differently from the pieces I usually publish here.

The Historical Context
The Tokyo Summer Olympics of 1964—held, it is worth remembering, in October rather than during Japan’s sweltering summer—are generally considered one of the defining symbolic moments in modern Japanese history. They were the first Olympic Games ever hosted by an Asian nation; the Games originally awarded to Tokyo in 1940 had been cancelled because of the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. More importantly, they symbolically marked Japan’s definitive transition from postwar reconstruction to the period of rapid economic growth that would later become known as the Japanese economic miracle.
The Games also brought about lasting material transformations in the country. The construction of the Shinkansen high-speed rail line was justified in part by the need to accommodate the Olympics, giving rise to a technological innovation that would profoundly reshape Japan’s territory, patterns of mobility, and urban development over the following decades. At the same time, the Olympics accelerated the spread of television sets into Japanese households. The rapid adoption of television, driven in no small part by the Games, contributed to a fundamental shift in entertainment habits and became one of the factors behind the decline of the Japanese film industry in the early 1970s, bringing to an end the era of the big studios.

It is against this broader historical backdrop that Ichikawa’s sprawling documentary should be (re)considered. Released just five months after the conclusion of the Games, Tokyo Olympiad went on to become one of the biggest box-office successes in Japanese history, a distinction it still holds today, ranking as the country’s fifth most-watched film with more than 23 million tickets sold. A curiosity, to this day the first place with allegedly 100 million tickets sold belong to The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya (1942) a propaganda war film by Yamamoto Kajirō and with special effects by Tsuburaya Eiji.  

The Opening Ceremony and the Emperor
Tokyo Olympiad unfolds chronologically, following the progression of the Olympic Games from beginning to end. It opens with images of a building being demolished to make way for the construction of new Olympic facilities. This act of destruction can be read in several ways. On one level, it symbolizes a nation in transition, leaving its past behind as it enters a new era. On another, it hints at the darker side of economic growth and “progress”: the inevitable reality that someone or something is always left behind, forgotten, or quite literally destroyed.

This part maudite of postwar modernization has been a recurring concern in Japanese cinema, particularly in the work of filmmakers who emerged during the 1960s, such as Ōshima Nagisa, Imamura Shōhei, Masumura Yasuzō, Yoshida Kijū, and Shinoda Masahiro. Staying within the realm of non-fiction, and in close dialogue with the Olympics themselves, it is also worth recalling Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s On the Road: A Document (Dokyumento rojō, 1964), another film that captures the less celebrated realities hidden beneath the triumphant narrative of Japan’s rapid modernization.

The demolition scenes soon give way to more spectacular imagery, accompanied by a concise narration recounting the history of the modern Olympic Games and tracing the Olympic torch’s journey from Greece to Japan. Aerial shots, street-level footage, and brisk, often lyrical editing follow the relay across continents, frequently lingering on the faces of the people it encounters. Significantly, the film places particular emphasis on Asian countries and their populations, an appropriate choice given that these were the first Olympic Games ever held on the continent.

This opening section culminates in a montage of the opening ceremony, with athletes from the participating nations parading into the stadium. The traditional sporting and geopolitical powers are, of course, present: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the two German states competing separately under a unified team. Yet Ichikawa and his collaborators devote considerable attention to smaller delegations that would have been almost unknown to Japanese audiences at the time, including countries such as Congo and Cameroon.

Within these first thirty minutes, the documentary’s guiding approach is already clearly established. While it provides a comprehensive portrait of the Games, its gaze is repeatedly drawn toward smaller, seemingly less significant stories. The spectators, officials, and the quiet moments of preparation or recovery before and after the competitions become just as important as the athletes themselves.

At the same time, this opening section reveals many of the contradictions embedded both in the Olympic Games and, inevitably, in the documentary itself. Emperor Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa), whom many historians regard as bearing responsibility for Japan’s imperial expansion and colonial violence across Asia during the first half of the twentieth century, appears repeatedly on screen. In an opening ceremony celebrating international unity and peace, the prominence given to the Emperor’s face and voice is difficult to ignore. For Japanese audiences in 1965, his voice would inevitably have recalled the radio broadcast announcing Japan’s surrender following the atomic bombings. His presence therefore introduces a tension into the film’s message of universal harmony. Yet this contradiction ultimately belongs perhaps less to Ichikawa’s documentary than to the Olympic games themselves.


A horizontal approach
The coverage of the competitions begins with the men’s 100 metres, the high jump, and the weight throw, perhaps the discipline that best exemplifies Ichikawa’s visual approach and the work of his six cinematographers. Through carefully orchestrated silences and a sound design that isolates the athletes’ breathing, footsteps, and physical exertion, the sequence conveys the profound solitude of athletic performance. The ambient sound was recorded by Ichikawa’s own crew, while the commentary appears to be taken from the original Japanese television broadcasts of the Games.
More than anything else, the documentary captures the poetry of athletic effort through its extensive use of slow motion and long telephoto lenses. Combined with the widescreen TohoScope format, these techniques lend the film a distinctive visual language that remains immediately recognizable more than sixty years after its release.

As mentioned earlier, however, Ichikawa is ultimately less interested in sporting triumphs than in the stories unfolding at their margins. Victories are presented with remarkable restraint. There is no easy mythologizing of champions: we see the event, hear the winner’s name announced, listen to the national anthem, and then the film moves on. What is celebrated instead is the athletic gesture itself—the beauty of movement, as in the slow-motion sequence of a gymnast suspended against a black background, one of the film’s most strikingly stylized images. Equally important is the determination simply to complete the contest, exemplified by the runner from Sri Lanka—then competing as Ceylon—who finishes last in the men’s 10,000 metres.

After the intermission, the documentary continues its search for these “minor” stories. It opens with Ahmed Issa, a middle-distance runner from Chad, a nation that had gained independence only four years earlier and had sent just three athletes to Tokyo. The film briefly follows his solitary training sessions in the Olympic Village before accompanying him to the 800 metres, where his journey ends in the semi-finals.

A multitude of sports, a multitude of styles
The documentary’s second half moves steadily through a wide range of sporting events, each distinguished by its own visual and sonic identity. Among the most memorable are the weightlifting sequences, introduced by a series of sketches, and filmed in extreme close-ups; the Greco-Roman wrestling, introduced through an almost Cubist montage of intertwined limbs and bodies; and the boxing matches. Boxing is presented entirely in black and white, a stylistic choice that seems to emphasize the sport’s timeless, almost archaic qualities. In striking contrast, the women’s foil competition unfolds as a rapid, almost subliminal montage of vivid colours, evoking the visual language of 1960s Pop Art.

Each discipline is therefore granted its own cinematic treatment. Cycling, for example, takes the viewer beyond the Olympic venues and into the Japanese countryside, accompanied by an uptempo jazz soundtrack that conveys both speed and exhilaration. Throughout the film, Ichikawa refuses to impose a single visual style upon the Games. Instead, he continually adapts his cinematic language to the rhythm, physicality, and emotional texture of each sport.

It is in moments like these that Ichikawa’s remarkable versatility as a filmmaker becomes particularly evident. Over the course of his long career, few Japanese directors demonstrated such an ability to reinvent their style according to the subject at hand. From his beginnings in animation to documentaries and experimental pop-inflected commercials, from the period dramas of the 1950s and 1960s to The Inugami Family (Inugami-ke no Ichizoku, 1976)—the mystery film that not only revitalized his career but also reshaped the Japanese film industry by paving the way for what would later become known as the media mix.

The final thirty minutes of the documentary are devoted to the marathon and the closing ceremony. Once again, alongside the leading athletes of the race—including Abebe Bikila—the film turns its attention to those who fail to complete the course: the runners who collapse on the road, exhausted, as well as the anonymous volunteers and refreshment stations offering drinks and wet sponges to the competitors.


Documentary vs militant documentaries
It is difficult not to consider Tokyo Olympiad a masterpiece of documentary cinema, almost a John Ford of non-fiction filmmaking, one might say. It is a work that remains technically breathtaking, thanks to its creative use of telephoto lenses, slow motion, large-format film, editing, camera angles, and frame composition. At the same time approaching the Olympic Games from a remarkably horizontal perspective, refusing to privilege certain athletes, nations, or sporting powers over others.

However, this vision and praise is only possible by understanding the documentary primarily as cinema-spectacle, one of the possible modes of non-fiction filmmaking, and by placing in parentheses everything that exists behind the Olympic machine: political rivalries and pressures, corruption, as well as the sacrifices imposed upon parts of the host population, usually those with the least social and economic power.

By accepting the project, Ichikawa had already chosen to stand with the Olympic Committee and the organisers, a position that was, in many ways, consistent with his long history of working within the major studio system (at least until the end of the 1960s). The members of “the other side” should already be familiar if you’ve been reading this space over the years: Ogawa, Tsuchimoto, and the many filmmakers, groups, and collectives who were resisting a particular way of producing, distributing, and exhibiting documentaries in Japan at the time.

And yet, in a way that recalls Ford once again, perhaps the images of Tokyo Olympiad ultimately resist and even contradict the very framework in which they were produced, or at least that is one of my more hopeful readings. The opening image of demolition is a perfect example. Reconsidered in light of what I have pointed out, it acquires an even greater complexity, becoming an unresolved and opaque symbol. Perhaps this is not enough to fundamentally alter our understanding of the documentary—we should get rid of our attachment to ‘spectacle’ and the ‘beautiful images’ once for all—but it remains a fascinating tension nonetheless.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Cinematographer Segawa Jun’ichi: Tracing Japanese Documentary Cinema through His Works

Of the many satellite events organized during last October’s Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival that I was unable to attend, one in particular caught my attention: “Cinematographer Segawa Jun’ichi: Tracing Japanese Documentary Cinema through His Works.”
This was an event organized to revisit the legacy of Segawa as a cameraman 30 years since his passing, and to kick off a retrospective that was held last December at the Athénée Français Cultural Center in Tokyo before traveling to Osaka’s Cinema Nouveau this February.

Although I had previously seen several documentaries in which Segawa worked as cinematographer, I only became fully aware of the real scope of his contribution to Japanese cinema about five years ago, while researching Haneda Sumiko’s Ode to Mt. Hayachine (1982). In Hayachine no fu (1984), her book on the film—part reflection on its genesis, part production diary—Haneda emphasizes several times the importance of having Segawa behind the camera.
In what is arguably her masterpiece, Haneda organized the shooting into two units. One group, led by Nishio Kiyoshi, focused primarily on filming the villages of Take and Ōtsugunai, while the other, lead by Segawa, concentrated on the alpine landscapes and the scenes shot near or at the summit of Mt. Hayachine, although for major sequences, such as the summer festival, the entire crew worked together. Haneda repeatedly stresses how decisive Segawa’s prior experience filming at high altitudes—and the fact that he was himself from Iwate Prefecture, where the mountain is located—proved to be for the success of the documentary.

Once I realized how central Segawa had been to the making of Ode to Mt. Hayachine, I began to look more closely at his career and discovered his involvement in several other landmark works in the history of Japanese documentary cinema such as Kamei Fumio’s Fighting Soldiers (1939) or Yanagisawa Hisao’s Children Before the Dawn (1968).
The retrospective moves precisely in this direction, offering a cartography of the evolution of Japanese nonfiction cinema, but also fiction films, through the major works in which Segawa played a key role.
24 works were screened in Tokyo and Osaka, here the list of the films in chronological order:

戦ふ兵隊 Fighting Soldiers (Kamei Fumio, 1939)
銀嶺の果て Snow Trail (Taniguchi Senkichi, 1947)
ジャコ萬と鉄 Jakoman and Tetsu (Taniguchi Senkichi, 1949)
新しい鉄 Atarashii tetsu (Ise Chōnosuke, 1956)
法隆寺 Hōryū-ji (Hani Susumu, 1958)
新しい製鉄所 Atarashī seitetsusho (Ise Chōnosuke, 1959)
留学生チュアスイリン Chua Swee Lin, Exchange Student (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1965)
夜明け前の子どもたち Children Before the Dawn (Yanagisawa Hisao, 1968)
仕事＝重サ×距離 三菱長崎造船所からのレポート Work = Weight x Distance Report from Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard (Matsukawa Yasuo, 1971)
風 The Wind (Segawa Jun’ichi, 1977)
遠い一本の道 The Far Road (Hidari Sachiko, 1977)
不安な質問 Anxious Questions (Matsukawa Yasuo, 1979)
海とお月さまたち Fishing Moon (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1980)
水俣の図・物語 The Minamata Mural (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1981)
早池峰の賦 Ode to Mt. Hayachine (Haneda Sumiko, 1982)
アントニー・ガウディー Antonio Gaudì (Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1984)
奈緒ちゃん Nao-chan (Ise Shin’ichi, 1995)
ルーペ カメラマン瀬川順一の眼 Magnifying Glass: The Eyes of Photographer Jun’ichi Segawa (Ise Shin’ichi, 1997)
回想・瀬川順一 土本典昭、2003年3月13日 (Tsutsui Takefumi, 2025)

Unfortunately, I was able to spend only one day in each city, but I managed nonetheless to see or revisit some milestones of Japanese documentary cinema.
In Tokyo, I attended a screening of Ode to Mt. Hayachine. Although I had watched it multiple times for my research, this was my first experience seeing it on 16mm and in a theatrical setting—and it was a revelation. The more lyrical sequences were, as expected, awe-inspiring, yet what stayed with me most after this viewing was Haneda and her team’s remarkable ability to weave an intricate and expansive audiovisual tapestry, in which people, history, folkloric practices, economic realities, non-human forces, and the mountain itself are all delicately embroidered into an ever-changing, open-ended whole.

My day in Osaka was more densely packed, with screenings of Jakoman and Tetsu—one of the few fiction films included in the retrospective, and perhaps the most handsome Mifune Toshirō has ever looked on screen—The Minamata Mural, one of the most powerful works Tsuchimoto Noriaki directed on the Minamata disaster, and Hani Susumu’s Hōryū-ji, which left such a deep impression on me that I decided to write about it separately. Like Hōryū-ji, Antonio Gaudí (1984)—the fourth film I saw in Osaka—engages with art, though of a different kind from the Buddhist sculpture housed at the temple in Nara. The way Segawa Jun’ichi’s camera and Teshigahara’s Hiroshi’s direction capture Gaudí’s sinuous buildings and imagination—enhanced by the music by Takemitsu Tōru—is hypnotic. For my part, the film could easily have lasted six hours.

I’m not sure whether the retrospective will travel to other Japanese cities, I suspect it will not, but I secretly hope it might eventually make its way to the Chūbu region region, where I live.
The event was planned and organized by Tsutsui Takefumi, Tanaka Shinpei, Nakamura Daigo, and Okada Hidenori, and was accompanied by an excellent catalogue (in Japanese), featuring essays by film historians, scholars, and directors — including a contribution by Hamaguchi Ryūsuke.