JFF+ INDEPENDENT CINEMA, a special streaming program organized by the Japan Foundation, is shining the spotlight on independent theaters, so-called “mini-theaters” that have nurtured the diversity of Japanese cinema culture. The free program aimed at overseas audiences is streaming Japanese films selected by managers of mini-theaters.

Mutsuko Shio is the general manager at Cinémathèque Takasaki, a theater in Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture. She recommended two films for us: "Wonderwall: the Movie" (2020) from director Yuki Maeda and "Drive Into Night" (2022) by director Dai Sako. Both are narrative films that offer a vivid look into modern-day Japanese society and the many disruptions it is currently facing.

For this interview, we visited Cinémathèque Takasaki and spoke with general manager Mutsuko Shio about the history of the movie theater and about Japanese film today.

Text: Rie Tsukinaga Photo: Masahiro Nishimura Editing: The Japan Foundation

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Cinémathèque Takasaki is located just a few minutes’ walk from Takasaki Station in Gunma Prefecture. Established in 2004, it features an entire wall covered in signatures from directors and actors who have visited over the years. A diverse array of films are screened here, as the concept behind the theater was to create a local place for people to see a variety of cinematic works. It has become the heart of Takasaki’s film culture, providing critical support for modern Japanese film.

Prior to the establishment of Cinémathèque Takasaki, the local film scene was driven by the Takasaki Film Festival. Launched in 1987, the festival is a favorite of movie buffs from Takasaki and suburban Tokyo alike. The festival is celebrated for its ability to pick out quality films regardless of the size of the production; its New Age Director award has been presented to outstanding freshman works such as "Maborosi" by Hirokazu Kore-eda, "Helpless" by Shinji Aoyama, "2/Duo" by Nobuhiro Suwa, and "Wild Berries" by Miwa Nishikawa. Many of these directors went on to make their mark on the global stage.

Current general manager Mutsuko Shio also first got involved with Cinémathèque Takasaki through her participation in the Takasaki Film Festival. The encounter was a striking one.

Shio I first signed up to be a volunteer staff member for the Takasaki Film Festival in 1999. It was the thirteenth year that the festival had been held. I was going to a local university at the time, and decided to write my senior thesis on film–which caused a friend to ask if I’d like to volunteer for the Takasaki Film Festival with her. She figured it would help me with my thesis. But to be honest, I had zero interest in doing it. My parents had taken me to the Takasaki Film Festival once when I was young, and it hadn’t crossed my mind since. Still, I didn’t want to turn down my friend who had gone out of her way to invite me along. So I resigned myself to following her to the festival office. It was a single room in an ancient, falling-apart condo, piled high with documents and all kinds of clutter. Then the staff started showing up and everyone had these huge personalities. I immediately regretted my decision. “There’s no way,” I thought. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

As a college student, Shio was taken aback by the strong personalities of the festival staff. Masao Mogi, who headed up the Takasaki Film Festival team at the time, had a particularly charismatic presence.

Shio As I stood frozen in a corner of the office, a laid-back looking guy dressed in black from head to toe walked in. It was Masao Mogi. “Why are you here?” he asked me, a smile lighting up his entire face. I was completely at a loss. He probably thought I was there because I loved film. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I was only there to write my senior thesis and that a friend dragged me in with her. Mogi, completely oblivious to the fact that I was cowering in the corner, proceeded to explain that everyone there, himself included, was working on behalf of the festival as a volunteer. Staffing was challenging work, he said, but it was a lot of fun once you got into it.

Although Shio dragged herself into participating, she eventually became swept up in the enthusiasm of the festival staff members.

Shio： I ended up going to the weekly meetings because I didn’t have the courage to refuse, but the more I went, the more I realized that the people who had initially frightened me with their intensity were actually amazing human beings. I guess I had liked movies prior to that, but it was only rarely that I actually went to see them at cinema complexes. The Takasaki Film Festival staff were true cinephiles though. They were nuts about film. Every time they showed up at the office, there’d be movie discussions breaking out left and right. Nobody cared a whiff about the financial returns. The entire festival was run on a passion for film. At first I was shocked, but the more I was around them, the more fun I started to have–and the more I started frantically watching films in order to keep up with the conversations.

I had also thought that if a film I wanted to see wasn’t playing at the theaters in Takasaki, I had no choice but to go into Tokyo to see it. But I was surprised to learn that those films were actually being screened at the Takasaki Film Festival. This rich cultural space had been right in my hometown all along–I had just never known about it. People here were doing these amazing things. I was amazed, and at the same time fascinated by the question of how we could get the word out to everyone about this film festival. I let that fascination drive my involvement, and before I knew it I had become a regular part of the festival staff.

Before Cinémathèque Takasaki opened, the Takasaki Film Festival staff would hold screening parties every two months or so in addition to the annual festival itself.

Shio： The festival staff members had always been involved in movie screenings. To give you some background, Tokyo underwent a mini-theater boom in the late 1980s, which also sparked interest in the arthouse films that could be seen in Takasaki. Video tapes weren’t widely available at that time, so they had to go directly to the distribution company and borrow the film if they wanted to see something. It cost money to borrow the reels, so they started getting people together for screening parties to pay for them. That’s how it all started. In other words, they got involved in screening activities out of their own desire to watch films–which gradually evolved into a desire to show people the films they thought were good. Even when they kicked off the film festival, I’m sure they weren’t doing it because they wanted to hold a big event every year. They wanted to create an opportunity to regularly bring people the cinema. Mogi had been talking about opening a theater someday from the time I met him.

Mogi finally got his wish once the Takasaki Film Festival started taking hold in the community. In July of 2004, he established a nonprofit organization called the Takasaki Community Cinema. Mogi served as general manager, with Shio serving as manager and Eiko Kobayashi, a fellow festival staff member, serving as assistant manager. They added a projectionist and someone to staff the front desk, and Cinémathèque Takasaki was up and running. But it turned out to be tremendously difficult to get their hands on films they actually wanted to screen.

Shio： Mogi was basically in charge of the programming, and had come up with a few films he wanted to show at the grand opening. But he was turned down by every single distribution company he approached. He kept at it for about six months, and finally opened his theater to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s "Café Lumière" (2003) and "The Blue Butterfly" (2004) by Léa Pool. In fact, "Café Lumière" was not only shot in Takasaki, but Mogi and I actually appear in the film. Despite all these twists and turns, it was really wonderful that we were able to feature these two films during the grand opening.

But we continually struggled to rent films for about three years afterwards. The distribution companies would always tell us they’d let us screen the films after they had been shown at the nearby cinema complex, or rent them six months to a year after they’d been released in Tokyo. But we didn’t want to be a second-rate theater. By the time a film is a year old, everyone who really wants to see it has already gone to Tokyo to do so. That’s when it really hit us how difficult it was to screen the films we wanted when we wanted them.

Those were still the film reel days, so I’m sure part of the reason was that they physically couldn’t rent out the reels to local cinemas until they had traveled around to all the big cities–plus they just didn’t release as many copies of the film as they do today. So the distribution companies were probably reluctant to rent out their precious copies to fledgling theaters. I mean, it was rare for local mini-theaters to even exist back then.

The theater struggled and struggled, and just when it finally started to get on track, it lost its heart and soul when Masao Mogi fell ill and passed away in 2008. It was a tremendous heartbreak and shock to Shio and everyone involved in the theater.

Shio： To be honest, I thought the film festival would disappear when Mogi died. The rest of us had just been following Mogi. We never thought we would be able to do what he did. But a film festival run by volunteers is not the same as a movie theater, which is an actual company. Our employees’ livelihoods were at stake. Still, that didn’t mean I could just take over Mogi’s role and run the theater. There was just no way. So I asked the director of the nonprofit, who was experienced at running companies, if he would take over our operations.

He told me that we needed to use this opportunity to completely overhaul our management approach, and gave us some ideas on how to make a fresh start. But the proposals he suggested were things that we had always been against. I’m pretty sure that our operations would have improved had we adopted his new way of doing things. But they just didn’t align with the convictions that Mogi and the rest of us held for the theater.

While all this was going on, some of Mogi’s friends reached out to me and demanded to know why I wasn’t taking over the theater. They told me that there was no way the theater would be run the way we wanted if it was taken over by someone who didn’t understand our principles. I protested that I knew nothing about running a company and that it would fall apart if we didn’t do something. They responded that they would be there to see me through it. “If you take over, we’ll all stand behind you,” they said. Their words gave me the courage to go all in.

That’s how Mutsuko Shio was appointed Representative Director of the nonprofit Takasaki Community Cinema. She began dedicating herself to making it work, including trying out new ideas.

Shio： I started racking my brain to figure out how we could run the theater without compromising our principles. When I looked into getting some help from the local government, it led to the city asking us to start up the Takasaki Film Commission Project, get involved in a project to restart and run the Takasaki Denkikan–a theater with over a century of history–plus some other things. As our business activities expanded, we changed our approach to running the theater.

The success of the Takasaki Film Festival is certainly one reason Shio is able to work so closely with the local government, but it’s also because Takasaki has always been known as a city of culture. The Takasaki Philharmonic Orchestra, which was formed just after the war, was a local orchestra pioneer, making Takasaki famous as a “city of music.” The Takasaki City Theatre, which houses a large performance hall, was built near the station in 2019.

Shio： People like to say that there’s some kind of cultural event going on nearly every week in Takasaki. There are certainly several public events that have been going on for decades around here. It’s not just the Takasaki Film Festival–we’ve also got the Takasaki Music Festival, the Takasaki Marching Festival, the Takasaki Children’s Book Festival, and so on. The government’s really got a good system in place for supporting all of it. The current mayor of Takasaki always says that Cinémathèque Takasaki is one of the city’s treasures. He even went out of his way to help us when the pandemic threatened our survival.

Technically we’re a private theater, but the spirit of community cinema is still at the heart of everything we do. We’re about coming together with the local people to preserve culture–and to bring the culture of film to Takasaki. I think the mayor of Takasaki understands that, too. Theater people elsewhere are surprised to learn that their cities don’t support film culture the way Takasaki does. Local citizens are also open to films being made, and film commissioning activities are incredibly vibrant here in Takasaki. Takasaki has actually been the setting for a variety of films as well.

The Takasaki Byakue Daikannon statue on top of Mt. Kannonyama that appears in the film "Ramen Teh" (2017) directed by Eric Khoo is only about a fifteen-minute walk from here. The people of Takasaki feel that the statue has a special protective presence in their daily lives. Mt. Haruna and Lake Haruna are two other famous nearby landmarks that are often used as a backdrop in films.

Cinémathèque Takasaki has been through so much. What was the biggest hit you ever screened here?

Shio： Our first major hit was "Kamome Diner" (2005) by Naoko Ogigami. That movie held the top spot for a while after that, but it was recently outdone by Bong Joon-ho’s "Parasite" (2019). Kohei Oguri’s "Umoregi – The Buried Forest" (2005) was a local movie filmed here in Gunma Prefecture that made a big splash, too.

Shio’s work isn’t just about running the business. As the face of the Takasaki Film Festival and Cinémathèque Takasaki, she also travels around Japan giving talks and writing countless editorial pieces and essays. The theater puts out a monthly publication called "Cinémathèque Takasaki Screen News", for which she regularly writes the opening column.

Shio： Since turning over managerial operations to Eiko Kobayashi, I’ve given her complete control over our programming. But I still write the column. Ever since screening formats went from film to DCP, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of copies released, and the number of films we’re able to show has been steadily trending up as well. The increase in screening copies also means that there are fewer opportunities to really pour ourselves into introducing individual films, but I’ve set up my column as a way to recommend a particular work each month, and that allows me to really go into detail. Kobayashi, incidentally, is absolutely wild about Korean films–so she puts together flyers by hand to send out to our customers every time we show one here.

The staff is naturally made up of cinephiles, and some even go on to make a name for themselves in filmmaking as well.

Shio： Kasho Iizuka, who made his directorial debut with "The World For Two Of Us" (2020), and Miku Ubukata, who wrote the screenplay for the popular Fuji TV drama "Silent" (2022), both worked part-time jobs here at one time. Both of them had always intended to make films, and I think they chose to pick up some work here on their way to making it big in Tokyo. The young directors Yuri Takei, who made "The Red Comet Club" (2017), and Yuka Eda, who made "Girls’ Encounter" (2018), are originally from Takasaki, though they never worked here.

Mogi was always saying how he wanted to create a place where young people in the local community who wanted to work in film felt they could be involved with the cinema without heading out to Tokyo. So when I see the kids that once worked here go on to make a name for themselves in the industry, it makes me truly grateful for having put in these eighteen years of hard work. It also makes me even more committed to creating a theater and Film Commission work that allows people to experience real film work locally without having to leave for the big city.

We ended by asking Shio to recommend two films for the JFF+ INDEPENDENT CINEMA project for foreign audiences.

Shio： "Drive Into Night" and "Wonderwall: the Movie" are two films that really capture the feel of smaller Japanese cities, which are quite unlike the country’s big metro areas. They may have nice mountains or natural beauty, but Japan’s small towns are places that rarely boast anything truly outstanding. In that way, these two films are incredibly realistic portrayals of what life is really like in those towns.

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JFF+ INDEPENDENT CINEMA

https://jff.jpf.go.jp/watch/independent-cinema/
Organizer: The Japan Foundation (JF)
In cooperation with: Japan Community Cinema Center
Period: December 15, 2022–June 15, 2023 (6 months)
Streaming areas: Worldwide, excluding Japan (some films not streamed in certain areas)
Fee: Free (user registration is required to watch)
Languages: English, Spanish (some films have Japanese subtitles)

Films recommended by Cinémathèque Takasaki (Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture)
"Wonderwall: the Movie" (2020) directed by Yuki Maeda [Streaming: December 15,2022–March 15, 2023]
"Drive Into Night" (2022) directed by Dai Sako [Streaming: March 15–June 15, 2023]