Wavelength Docs presents CINEMA OF THE SELF at Close-Up Film Centre (13 to 14 NOV 2021)

Documentary specialist Wavelength presents a two-day programme of rarely screened Japanese personal documentaries, exploring love, family, work, & identity at Close-Up Film Centre.

Submitted by Wavelength Docs

This programme places its focus on one of the most disarming strands of Japan’s non-fiction cinema. Variously termed self-documentary, personal documentary or “I-film” (a cousin to the I-novel in Japanese literature), this form of auto-documentary-making began when Japanese filmmakers in the early 70s began to make films that pointed the camera either at themselves, or those closest to them.

Distributing and exhibiting the results outside of commercial circuits, the films could take the form of home videos, diaries, portraits, confessions, or a combination thereof. Raw, naked and intimate, both in form and content, self-documentary has often been the province of fledgling filmmakers willing to take on the challenge to put something on the line, to present their lives with an honesty as unvarnished as possible.

So, while beauty, humour, lightness of the everyday are present, above all, it’s the private moments that give these films their power to surprise and move.

Curated by Sunil Chauhan (Wavelength Docs), this programme brings together some of the best of the sub-genre to come from Japan in the last 25 years.

Wavelength Docs presents
CINEMA OF THE SELF: PERSONAL DOCUMENTARY IN JAPAN at Close-Up Film Centre (13 to 14 NOV 2021), booking now!

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