Until very recently you wouldn’t find film director Sachi Hamano in the reference books: Japan’s mainstream film industry has historically been more than a little reluctant to allow women behind the camera. The Directors Guild of Japan, for example, counts only 20 women among its 547 members. And in the expanded 1982 edition of their influential 1959 survey The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, writers Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie don’t list a single woman in their chapter on directors.
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Yet Hamano, whose 2001 Lily Festival concludes this month’s Gene Siskel Film Center series “Films by Japanese Women,” has more than 300 films to her name. When she started making movies in the late 1960s there were no film schools to funnel talent into the industry, and her attempts to land a job with established companies were thwarted, since, according to Hamano, two qualifications for employment were that candidates be both male and college graduates. Eager to direct–largely because she was unhappy with the limits of female stereotypes such as “mother,” “wife,” “daughter,” and “prostitute”–she decided to enter through the back door, via the independent pinku eiga, or “pink films,” the Japanese term for soft-core porn.
Hamano’s “entertainment feature” debut, Midori, was about a neglected woman writer. Over 12,000 women donated generously to help fund its production, and wherever it was screened she met women who’d seen her pinku eiga work and wanted to talk about their sexual experiences. Their frankness inspired Lily Festival, a subversive comedy whose theme is sex and older women and whose cast members range in age from 69 to 91. When Hamano broached the idea with male producers, they said, “Who likes to watch old ladies having sex?” She turned again to alternative sources of funding for the $600,000 project.
