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Nanami: The Inferno of First Love
(Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen)

Director in Person
Screening on Film
$12 Special Event Tickets
Directed by Susumu Hani.
With Akio Takahashi, Kuniko Ishii, Koji Mitsui.
Japan, 1968, 35mm, black & white, 108 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: HFA

00:00 / 00:00
      Nanami: The Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen) with introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Susumu Hani.

      One of the signature masterworks of the Japanese New Wave, Hani's intense and brilliantly unpredictable portrait of youth engulfed in amorous flames is a showcase for Hani's innovative documentary approach to cinema and his rare sensitivity to the fluttering dream of adolescence. The story of a shy young man drawn into the spell of an attractive, outgoing model with a secret life, Nanami: The Inferno of First Love grows increasingly darker and stranger as the girl leads him deeper in the Tokyo underworld and into the troubled recesses of his repressed traumas and fears. While the film's crypto-sexual dreamscape must be partially credited to it's co-writer, the legendary enfant terrible of the Japanese avant-garde, Shuji Terayama, Nanami's intimacy with its young actors and postwar youth culture clearly draws from Hani's earlier work. Shot in grainy 16mm black-and-white Nanami is also a fascinating document of Sixties Tokyo, pulling back the steamy, seedy folds of the same urban underbelly being discovered by photographers like Daido Moriyama and by Hani's contemporary, the avant-garde documentarian Toshio Matsumoto.

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