japanese
New Docs Japan
  • Chizuru
  • Give Back Kama’s Rights! 2011
  • Goodbye UR—Japanese Social Housing Crisis
  • Never Let Me Go
  • September 11
  • Transgender Trouble
  • True to Myself
  • Yes, I Am Here
  • BETWEEN YESTERDAY & TOMORROW Omnibus Vol. 1 “APRIL 2011,” Omnibus Vol. 2 “MAY 2011”
  • Associations of Silverpencils
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    Associations of Silverpencils

    (Ginengahokai)
    - JAPAN / 2011 / Japanese / Color / 8mm / 90 min

    Directors: Associations of Silverpencils (Mabuchi Toru, Kurihara Mie, Arai Miho, Tachibana Kaoru, Iimura Takahiko, Yamazaki Mikio, Shimada Yukiyasu, Murakami Kenji, Uchimura Shigeta, Otani Takatomi, Nakagawa Kyuya, Fujiwara Sho, Onishi Kenji)

    People say 8mm film is a vanishing medium, doomed as its manufacturers cut back production. Yet there are many artists in Japan who still work in film, inspiring new artists to do so as well. Gathered here are 13 filmmakers. They develop silver halide themselves, manipulating it with mastery in a jam session of films experimental, documentary, personal, and scientific.


    [Director’s Statement] This is a film about a medium approaching extinction, an 8mm documentary film about a vanishing 8mm cinema. Blending two genres, the science film and the personal film, and benefiting from the participation of multiple generations of cineastes, it is a reflection upon the original cinematic experience.


    - Onishi Kenji

    Onishi’s other films include A Burning Star (1995; YIDFF 1997) and Field Feet (2008; YIDFF 2009). Amid whispers about the dying breaths of film culture, he has inaugurated, in collaboration with the photographer Mabuchi Toru, the Associations of Silverpencils, a secret society carrying on the tradition of “cinematics/shadows.”