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. – Haden Guest