As her husband Eiichi becomes more entangled in his life as businessman, Naoko looks for ways to expand her own life even as her husband's life shrinks in scope and intimacy. She finds new interests, new love, and a greater sense of her place in the world.
One day, Kandume's can boy, who happily lived with his friends in the kitchen, becomes an empty can and is discarded. Eventually, he has a dream about the history of iron and humanity. He sees how iron that melted and flowed out during a forest fire, was discovered by humans once it cooled and...
This celebrated documentary, filmed in colour, depicts one of the most famous of all Japanese temples. Horyu-ji, in the small town of Ikaruga outside Japan’s ancient capital of Nara, was one of the first Buddhist places of worship established in Japan, and contains the oldest surviving wooden...
A teaching film for social studies, which was developed as a new educational subject in 1947. At an elementary school in Hokkaido, children have started a fly extermination campaign to improve school hygiene. In order to eliminate the causes of flies, the entire town is working to improve the...
Haneda employed various cinematic and scientific technic to explore the world of cabbage butterfly, and the result was a completely new type of educational film.
From the opening sequence, combining underwater and aerial footage, this masterpiece about the construction of a steam-power plant in Kurihama (south of Tokyo) far surpasses the limitations of the promotional film genre, and emerges as one of the most staggering sensory experiences in Japanese...
Shot in a retirement home over a period of two years, this film raises the question of "how to take care". The director films with great tenderness, not only the daily life of patients with senile dementia, but also the work of caregivers. Widely broadcast, the film sparked lively debate on the...
School for Village Women, Women’s College in the Village
01957HD
Haneda’s debut as full director, made after four years spent as an assistant, is set in a farming village in Shiga Prefecture (east of Kyoto). The film depicts the traditional architecture, lifestyles and customs of the village, its agricultural and domestic labour, but its central focus, as with...
An educative film about the water supply and watersystems in small towns and villages in Japan. It captures the unsanitary and inconvenient lifestyles without water supply through examples from various places, and shows how life can be brighter if a small but managed water supply is installed. The...
Commissioned by the Tokyo National Museum, this film, regarded in some quarters as the masterpiece of Haneda’s Iwanami period, is one of several in which she documented Japan’s ancient and classical artistic treasures. Here she focuses on the Tokyo National Museum’s collection of art from the...
A young delinquent takes part in a robbery and is sentenced to a juvenile detention center, where he clashes with other youths and reflects on his life experiences.
This engaging documentary focuses on a group of ‘studying mothers’ who decide to involve themselves in the civic politics of a provincial town, Kunitachi.
Children Who Draw explores the delicate chemistry of school children interacting in an art class through a constant juxtaposition of observational black-and-white portraits of the young children with lyrical passages shot in vivid color exploring their imaginative and expressive paintings....
