Slightly edited in January 2025
Born in 1926 in Dalian, China, while the area was still under Japanese occupation, Haneda Sumiko later moved to Japan and eventually joined Iwanami Productions (founded in 1950), a company that was to play a major role in the development of Japanese documentary in the post-war years. Within Iwanami, after working as an assistant director on some PR films, she made her debut behind the camera in 1957 with Women’s College in the Village (村の婦人学級); a 31-year-old woman directing a film at the end of the 1950s in a very male-dominated world like the Japanese film industry must have been, and was, something truly extraordinary. In 1981 Haneda left Iwanami Productions to become a freelance filmmaker, and from then on she made many non-fiction films, exploring a wide and diverse range of subjects, most of which were produced by Jiyū Kobo.
The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms 薄墨の桜 is a short and poetic documentary, a kind of visual poem, completed in 1977, but a project Haneda had been pursuing and thinking about for a long time. Shot in a small valley in Gifu Prefecture, the film is a reflection on the mortality and transience of all things, disguised as a documentary about a 1300-year-old cherry tree. Haneda and her cameraman follow the seasonal changes in and around this ancient tree, the festivals, and the life of the small communities in the surrounding area. The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms is also a mourning process for the death of her sister, a personal way for Haneda to deal with the devastating pain of losing her own sister, symbolically represented on screen by a girl who appears several times like a phantasmic presence, mostly at the beginning and end of the film.
As we can see from the stills below, taken from the last part of the film – a flowing river, small wild flowers and weeds, a graveyard, a girl sighing and, after a few close-ups of her looking at the camera, walking away – Haneda explores, visually and with a poetic touch, universal themes such as mortality, absence and the transience of life. What’s also significant about the film is that its more lyrical moments, such as the one just described, are punctuated by guitar arpeggios played by Iwasaki Mitsuharu, a musical theme that magnifies the fleeting essence of life embodied in the film.
The movie is available on DVD (only in Japanese) by Jiyū Kōbō or in this Iwanami Nihon Documentary DVD-BOX.
Asian Docs 
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