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.