Co-scripted by Hani and Yoshino Keiji, the founder of Iwanami Productions and one of the leading cinematographers of the postwar Japanese cinema, A Town Without Flies became the first smash hit of the Iwanami educational film company where Hani began his filmmaking career. While essentially a “public relations” short to promote hygiene, Hani and Yoshino’s script structured the film rather uniquely, contrasting the objective representation of school children and people in the community with surreal photo-microscopic images of flies. Called “science-fiction in the disguise of PR film” by reviewers, Hani holds a deep regard for this film as his first collaborative work with Keiji, his mentor.

Hani’s touching remake of a 1948 film by renowned director Hiroshi Inagaki, follows a group of young boys and classmates through a series of increasingly fraught tests of friendship, trust and honesty. Centered around the deeply sympathetic figure of a young boy with an unnamed learning disability who alternately inspires tenderness and aggression from his classmates, Children Hand in Hand offers the children as expressions of the rich contradictions of Japanese masculinity. The subdued, observational style refined in Hani’s documentaries vividly captures the struggles of the boys as they learn to recognize the true nature of their friendship in a world defined by rigid social conventions. As it fluidly captures the rhythm of the young boys’ pendulum swing between innocence and experience, Hani’s little seen film defines a fascinating region beyond the conventional boundary between fiction and documentary.