Sumiko Haneda’s The Poem of Hayachine Valley
Saturday, March 14, 2026 at 5pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Presented by The Theater of the Matters

The Poem of the Hayachine Valley, Sumiko Haneda, 1982, 16mm, 185 mins

The Theater of the Matters presents a dual program in honor of Paulo Rocha and Sumiko Haneda. Rocha’s The Island of Loves screens on March 13 at Japan Society.

In 1982, Portuguese filmmaker Paulo Rocha penned an appreciation of documentarian Sumiko Haneda: “I am a filmmaker, and until now I believed that I would be closer to the truth if I approached it through fiction. But now, after seeing The Poem of Hayachine Valley, I realize that the idea is an arrogant one… We must learn to see reality correctly to know the truth.” Rocha’s remarks were published in a booklet for the premiere of Haneda’s film in Tokyo, at the storied (and now defunct) Iwanami Hall, a vital center for the exhibition and distribution of art films in Japan, founded by the publishing company Iwanami Shoten.

Back in 1950, the publisher had established Iwanami Productions, a production unit focused on educational films. A decade before cinéma vérité, the filmmakers of Iwanami pioneered a new mode of documentary, founded in candidness and spontaneity, using telescopic lenses, handheld cameras, and other methods to capture the world in unstudied states of being. The company was responsible for cultivating a radical generation of documentarists in Japan: Shinsuke Ogawa, Noriaki Tsuchimoto, Susumu Hani, and—one of just two female directors at the company—Haneda. Beginning as an assistant to Hani, Haneda would go on to direct a beautiful and acclaimed short—The Cherry Tree with Grey Blossoms (1977), which documents a year in the life of a thousand-year-old cherry tree—before leaving Iwanami to become a freelance director.

Her first independent work, The Poem of Hayachine Valley, is Haneda’s most sprawling to date. It was born of a 1965 trip to the northern region of Tohoku, where Haneda encountered the Hayachine kagura, a ritual dance passed down by local farmers over the centuries and performed once a year in honor of the deity of Mount Hayachine. In the 80s, Haneda set out to create a record of this ancient form of worship, but tying it to contemporary material realities of the farmers in the region. Pointedly, the film opens with the destruction of the old farmhouse where Haneda saw her first kagura performance, and is suffused throughout with the minutiae of modern life: shopping centers, train stations, plastic products, roadways, the city. “I wanted to make this work as an expression of the spirit of the farmers in Tōhoku, beyond what is visible to the eye, and as an expression of the ever-changing flow of history,” wrote Haneda.

This collision of “past and future, nature and machinery, mountains and towns” left a deep impression on Rocha. A former assistant to Jean Renoir and Manoel de Oliveira, and a key figure of Portuguese cinema in the years before the Carnation Revolution, Rocha had been living in Japan for almost a decade at the time of Hayachine’s premiere, largely dormant since his landmark second feature Change of Life (1966). While working as a cultural attaché at the Portuguese embassy in Tokyo, Rocha had been obsessively planning a film based on the life of Romantic writer Wenceslau de Moraes, who lived and died in Japan in the early 20th century. The Island of Loves would ultimately take fourteen years to complete, and it finally premiered, like Hayachine, at Iwanami Hall in 1983. The film was an ambitious co-production blending medieval and Japanese theatrical influences, Greco-Roman myth, and ancient Chinese poetry, for which Rocha invited Haneda to write the stylized and literary Japanese dialogue.

As a tribute to Haneda and Rocha, we offer a rare 16mm screening of The Poem of Hayachine Valley, in its original, unabridged form.

- TM

Print courtesy of Japan Foundation. Special thanks to Linda Hoaglund.

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served, except for members subscribed at $8/month or more, who may reserve a seat by emailing information@lightindustry.org at least two hours prior to showtime. Box office opens at 4:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

The Children’s Cinema
Saturday, March 7, 2026 at 2pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

What’s Opera, Doc?, Chuck Jones, 1957, digital projection, 7 mins
Sculpture for Children, Doris Chase, 1974, 16mm, 5 mins
The Existentialist, Leon Prochnik, 1963, 16mm, 8 mins
Waterfall, Chick Strand, 1968, 16mm, 3 mins
Manhatta, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921, digital projection, 10 mins
Something Queer at the Library, Nell Cox, 1978, 16mm, 11 mins

The Children’s Cinema, Light Industry’s ongoing program for the junior moviegoer, returns. We’re starting things off with Bugs Bunny, in his unforgettable turn as Brünnhilde. Chuck Jones’s What’s Opera, Doc? represents a high-water mark in the history of animation, a spoof whose grandeur suits its subject. From mock Wagner we go straight into playtime, and see what kids can cook up with Doris Chase’s colorful, semi-circular sculptures. The Existentialist, by way of an impressively ambitious camera trick, features a man befuddled by the fact that everything around him in Manhattan appears to be moving backward. Chick Strand enchants the everyday via other inversions, transforming the negative images in Waterfall through hand-processing and solarization.

Also on offer is Manhatta, in which the buildings and bridges of Jazz Age New York are seen from a range of inspired angles and harmonically arranged. It’s an iconic city symphony and, we hope, for the young audience this afternoon, an exciting demonstration of what, among many other things, a movie can be: a voyage into the past. We chose to include Something Queer at the Library because it adds an element not otherwise present in this potpourri: a mystery (plus a little moral instruction). Two girls discover that the library books they borrowed have been vandalized—pictures snipped out, doodles in the margins. Outraged by this selfish destruction of something meant to be shared by all, the kids start sleuthing. There’s also a delightful subplot about a senior dog show (some of those attending might inquire afterwards about whether they can adopt an old basset hound, so be prepared for that conversation).

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door. Advanced tickets are also available here until one hour before showtime.

Please note: seating is limited. Box office opens at 1:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

Juvenilia
Tuesday, March 24, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Presented by James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Video Bunt (At the New Wal-Mart Across the Street from the Old Wal-Mart), James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2006, VHS-to-digital, 13 mins

Rip Van Winkle, Paul Terry Toons Productions, 1934, 16mm, 6 mins
Springtime, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2006, 16mm-to-digital, 5 mins
Auto-autumnals, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2008, 16mm-to-digital, 3 mins
Nature Mature, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2007, 16mm, 18 mins
Occupations, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, 2015, 16mm-to-digital, 11 mins
We Never Sleep, RKO-Pathé Screenliner, 1956, 16mm, 8 mins

Sometimes a guy wakes up and is like, “What happened?” Over twenty years ago, I was in art school. I should have been making paintings and applying for an MFA at Yale. Instead, I was making “moving image” and grinding away on a thesis concept about “homocentrism through the seasons,” which is not as gay as it sounds—at least that’s what I told myself then. I’d purchased a beloved Canon Scoopic (a compact 16mm camera intended for quick field journalism and a precursor to electronic news-gathering [ENG] video cameras) to shoot a motorcycle movie starring a high school classmate who is now an MMA fighter. I was lucky to have some footage of this escapade ready when my professor at the time, the filmmaker Jacob Burckhardt, invited the guitarist Marc Ribot to class. Working atop a rat’s nest of guitar cables, Ribot jammed an improvisatory score to what became Springtime. I owe him $400 if it ever makes any money.

A few months later, the late filmmaker Ross McLaren sold me his cumbersome and practically medieval Frezzolini 16mm camera, which possessed an oscillating crystal sound-sync mechanism I lusted after for my thesis endeavor, Nature Mature (obstinately pronounced “Natter Matter”). I bought a stack of discounted and long expired film stock on eBay, overconfident in my analysis of Harris Savides’s cinematography for Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (which I had caught by chance at the now defunct Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street), reasoning that the natural fog of aged emulsion could be part of the look. I wanted it to be a pure film film, so I went so far as to construct a dust-free eco-tent in my rented bedroom in the artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s parents’ house to cut straight negative, baby—huffing acetate cement as I toiled on even more gear wisely tossed by McLaren during his fire sale: a four-gang synchronizer, A/B rewinds, and a film splicer. It was a total disaster. DuArt called me up and said, “Kid, something’s wrong here.” The glue was bad and my edits had fallen apart in the printer. They didn’t charge me, and I taped up the damage and had to accept that the gooey, murky mess of a movie was mine. Per usual, I’d pushed too hard in too many directions, and the film had morphed into something probably best viewed as a document of its making, battered and torn before it was born.

Time passed. I graduated right at the start of a multinational financial crisis and sold the Frezzi and then the Scoopic on eBay to help pay for production of my feature Public Hearing. A user named ItsRainingBen69 (or something like that) bought it in a flash. I was elated and sad. He sent his attractive girlfriend to pick it up. We had coffee as I gave her the scoop on my filmmaking travails. Then she schlepped it to London and Ben Rivers shot something that ended up in the Tate (if memory serves). I felt that was an OK outcome. Blessedly, a Dutch cinematographer friend (the manliest man I’ve ever known) gifted me his old Aaton LTR to shoot Public Hearing on super 16mm (which was a great outcome), and it’s a camera I own to this day.

The problem with all this early 16mm work is that it made no real sense. Except for Nature Mature (and you’ll see how that turned out), up until 2010 or so, it was all destined to be transferred to and edited from the low-resolution archival prison of MiniDV, which is perhaps the truest medium of my Millennial filmmaking cohort, we wretched souls who entered artistic consciousness right at the decline of mainstream 16mm production, but years before the sexy revolution of high-bandwidth, low-cost HD. The most emblematic camera of that post-9/11 age was the Panasonic AG-DVX100, which promised to replicate the look of film on MiniDV through its 24p frame rate. (You can still find message board posts on DVInfo.net from an upstart named Barry Jenkins waxing poetic about his “old Panny” in the moonlight.)

Today, shooting real film is strangely, ironically more accessible than ever: film stock is chemically better; it scans better on high-resolution devices; it syncs better with digital monitoring; and simply looks cleaner and better, all at a lower emotional cost than ever. Now there’s a lot less detective work involved—less time and energy spent sourcing and searching, the brutal back-alley pursuits for the next new camera that promises to solve the deficiencies of the past. Sometimes I wonder what my early movies would have turned into under more forgiving conditions. Less camera, less men. But maybe the problem was me—the overzealous young man of a fading era.

This selection of subprime juvenilia is presented for your one-time amusement. Though it is transparently naive and both materially and narratively opaque, I believe it holds some charm, if only as a warning to others. The last time Nature Mature was projected on 16mm was at the New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals in 2007.

- JNKW

Followed by a conversation with Wilkins.

Wilkins’s latest feature, The Misconceived, recently premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served, except for members subscribed at $8/month or more, who may reserve a seat by emailing information@lightindustry.org at least two hours prior to showtime. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

Light Industry is supported by our members and, in part, by the Mellon Foundation through the Coalition of Small Arts New York. Public assistance is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.