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1990s Experimental Film in Japan: Women’s Anarchic Visions of the Everyday

Sunday, Feb. 22nd
2:15-4:15 PM
ATLAS 100

  • The Life of Ants (Ari no seikatsu) / Yūko Asano, Japan, 1994, 14 min

  • Benighted but Not Begun (Yukikuredo machiakazu) / Yukie Saitō, Japan, 1994, 22 min

  • The Place Which Isn’t Necessarily Wrong (Anagachi machigatteru tomo ienai kū) / Hiromi Saiki, Japan, 1996, 18 min

  • Night Park/White Roses (Yoruno kōen / shiroi bara) / Mari Terashima, Japan, 1997, 11 min

  • A Dandelion, Rosaceae (Bara-ka tanpopo) / Utako Koguchi, Japan, 1990, 8 min

Curated by Wakae Nakane and Miryam Sas

Emerging from Japan’s independent film culture of the 1990s, these five works by women filmmakers mark a quiet but decisive shift within experimental cinema. Enabled by the growing accessibility of small-gauge film and alternative exhibition spaces, the filmmakers move away from strict formal abstraction toward the textures of everyday life, bodies, rituals, and intimacies.

Across animation, performance, and experimental narrative forms, the films attend to gendered power relations, sexuality, and the fragile boundaries between private experience and social structure. Playful, unsettling, and resistant to easy classification, they articulate an anarchic language that renders the familiar strange, inviting viewers to linger in the ambiguities of intimacy and desire.