The Harvard Film Archive welcomes back acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Hamaguchi Ryusuke for a unique program of screenings, conversations, and the area premiere of GIFT, a live performance collaboration with composer-musician Ishibashi Eiko. Since his last visit, Hamaguchi has achieved international acclaim for recent films that have garnered top prizes from the world’s most prestigious film festivals and ceremonial bodies, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Today Hamaguchi is regularly heralded as one of the essential figures of contemporary world cinema and embraced as a guiding star by younger filmmakers around the world. Yet, despite this steadily growing adulation, Hamaguchi has resisted the temptation to seek out an even brighter spotlight and has instead remained steadfastly focused on his particular mode of resolutely independent auteurist filmmaking grounded in his abiding fascination with performance and dialogue as the alpha and omega of narrative cinema. If anything, his latest films only deepen his vision of a cinema shaped by a careful restraint, and even stripping down, of visual style, structure, and performance.

For this extended visit, Hamaguchi Ryusuke will be in person to present and discuss two recent films, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car, as well as a new restoration of a key work by Somai Shinji, a Japanese filmmaker who has exerted a deep influence on Hamaguchi’s cinema. The series also includes a live performance by Ishibashi Eiko for whose music Hamaguchi was invited to create a silent film that he would later expand, with sound, into his prizewinning most recent film, the ecological cautionary tale Evil Does Not Exist.

Special thanks: Alexander Zahlten—East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard; Shigehisa Kuriyama, Director; Gavin Whitelaw, Executive Director; Stacie Matsumoto, Associate Director—Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard; and Regina Greene—Front Porch Productions.

JSB members visit the member-portal for $5 off tickets!

Upcoming screenings from this program:

9/16 Monday 7:00 pm

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke, 2021

Director in Person

9/20 Friday 9:00 pm

Moving

Directed by Somai Shinji, 1993

9/21 Saturday 6:00 pm

Drive My Car

Directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke, 2021

Director in Person

9/23 Monday 6:00 pm & 8:30 pm

GIFT: A Live Score by Ishibashi Eiko X Film by Hamaguchi Ryusuke

Directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke, 2023

Live Musical Accompaniment

Director in Person