Markus Nornes declares that Hani’s early documentaries “sent shockwaves through the Japanese film world”. Funded by Japan’s Ministry of Education (Monbusho), this classic documentary was aimed to promote interest in the teaching profession. Initially the film was envisaged as a kind of docudrama, with an actor playing the key role of a problem student. But Hani, worried that the role would prove too challenging for a child actor, decided to film in a real school with real children. “He brought cameras into the classrooms of young students and closely watched their interactions,” writes Normes. “While they were initially concerned that the equipment and adult camera operators would distract the children … they quickly forgot about the filmmakers and went about the business of playing, drawing, and learning.” Hani himself believed that he had given the children “a psychological outlet,” and declared that “everyone agreed that my first documentary … was a new kind of picture, not just in Japanese cinema but also in Occidental cinema.” Hani shot an unusually large amount of footage to capture the natural behaviour of the children, and the film made him famous. Today it fully retains its vitality, spontaneity and charm.

Alex Jacoby e Johan Nordström

This followup to Kyoshitsu no kodomotachi not only was pronounced the year’s Best Short Film from the Japanese film magazine “Kinema Junpo”, but also won acclaim beyond Japan, scooping the prize for Best Short Film at Cannes and the award for Best Educational Short at Venice. Hani maintained the observational and spontaneous approach of the earlier film, while keeping the subjectivity of the participants to the fore by focusing on the creativity of its subjects. We witness a class of schoolchildren drawing pictures, painting, and modelling in clay or sand; occasional cutaways to full-colour close ups of the drawings allow the narrator to speculate on their meaning. Hani himself recalled screening the film many years later at a Japanese university that had gathered the original participants, now aged 60. “I was quite shocked,” he remarked, “because I thought that they would laugh at the movie. But I had recorded their images inside when they were very young, six or seven years old; I had recorded, maybe, very complicated, personal things. So, instead, they cried.”

Alex Jacoby and Johan Nordström

This celebrated documentary, filmed in colour, depicts one of the most famous of all Japanese temples. Horyu-ji, in the small town of Ikaruga outside Japan’s ancient capital of Nara, was one of the first Buddhist places of worship established in Japan, and contains the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world, dating from the seventh century. Producer Mitsuru Kudo describes the filming process: “For Horyu-ji, we spent about a week at Horyu-ji Temple making detailed observations and even doing film tests. That place has a special set of colours: the red of Horyu-ji, the colour of the earthen walls, the colour when the sky is clear, the colour when it’s wet. We had the leeway to stay in Nara and investigate.” In a sequence of inventive compositions, Hani records the striking features, variously placid, impassive and anguished, of the Buddhist statues themselves, while, in the opening scene, finding “a kind of ecstasy” in the living faces of the visitors watching a ritual performance at this ancient site. Distinguished modernist composer Yashiro Akio contributes a haunting score.

Alex Jacoby e Johan Nordström