Lilies keep blooming

When I think about Japanese film directors, some faces and names pop into my head. However, I could not think of any “female” film director. Although it was a long time ago when Barbara Murray Eddings insists in the writing, “Women in Broadcasting,” that jobs which require decision-making skills are taken by men, I strongly believe it still exist especially in Japan. Although Wikipedia is not perfectly accurate, I found only 35 female film directors out of 642 in the page of “List of Japanese film directors”. This shows that only 18.3% of Japanese film directors are females. I was shocked that it was really hard to find Japanese female film directors.

Sachi Hamano is a Japanese film director who was born in 1948. She is the most prolific and written-about female pink film director. Hamano has been directed a lot of films with a theme that “looking into sex subjectively from women’s perspective.” I found her interesting because she also published a book titled “When Women Make Films” and talks about how hard for women to take a position of making something new. As Judith Redding and Victoria A. Brownworth says in the writing “Debra Zimmerman and Women Make Movies,” that few projects by independent women filmmakers will be funded by government, Hamano also talks about how the society hesitate to raise money for women to make films.

I personally got surprised by the fact that there is a female porn filmmaker. I was thinking that movies which consist of sexual scenes are made only by men. Hamano wanted to be a film director, but there was no way but to be a pink film director. All of the film production companies say that required qualifications for application are men who have a college degree. She talks about her past in the interview, “I did anything to be a filmmaker. When I was about to be raped by other staffs because there was no room for women, I slept with a knife held in my bed.” She knew there will be a way to be a filmmaker if she takes advantage of being “female,” but she chose not to. Hamano often faced a situation where she could feel sexual discrimination while making films, but she never gave up.

The reason why Hamano decided to be a filmmaker was because she wanted to insist that women can live without men. In the past, all of the women’s roles was either “mother,” “wife,” or “daughter.” Main characters were always men, and those female characters are supporting the main guy. Hamano researched why there is a big gap between the women’s image in the movies and reality. Then she noticed there were only male filmmakers in Japan. Since males present women based on their “ideal image,” this gap exists.

When Hamano turned 50, she made a movie Lily Festival which is about sex of elderly people. Although it was (is) a taboo to address such subject, but she tried to show the sex of elderly people in a positive way. Talking about the sex of elderly women especially the ones who already reached menopause in the movie was one of her dream. When we see elderly people in movie, they are often senile. Hamano insists that is not real. Elderly people can also live happily and sexually. “Lilies (women) never die, lilies will keep blooming forever,” she concludes.

Works Cited

Tantan-sha. http://www.h3.dion.ne.jp/~tantan-s/

Hamano, Sachi. "When Women Make Films." Heibonsya: 2001. Print.