As a complement to The Other New Wave program, we will screen three films by the influential yet still underappreciated filmmaker Susumu Hani (b. 1928), one of the key figures of the postwar reinvigoration of Japanese cinema, showcasing Hani’s radical documentary approach to filmmaking as well as his deep fascination with children and the emergent and increasingly radicalized youth seeking to transform their society.

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 its 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 seedy folds of the same urban underbelly being discovered by photographers such as Daido Moriyama and by Hani's contemporary, the avant-garde documentarian Toshio Matsumoto.