The Documentary Cinema of Haneda Sumiko: Gender, Arts, Nature & Social Change in Contemporary Japan

Date
Monday 16 November 2026

Time
6.45pm

Venue
The Swedenborg Society
20-21 Bloomsbury Way (Hall entrance on Barter St)
London WC1A 2TH
[Map]

Booking Details
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This lecture explores the documentary cinema of Haneda Sumiko (1926-), a pioneering filmmaker whose work offers an extraordinary record of Japan's social, cultural and political transformations across the 20th and early 21st centuries. Over a career spanning more than six decades and more than eighty films, Haneda documented a wide range of subjects, including women's lives, historical memory, traditional arts, ageing, nature and social change, always combining a deep respect for her subjects with a critical awareness of the society they inhabit.

Drawing on six years of collaborative research, Marcos Centeno-Martín, Irene González-López and Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández will introduce key themes, films and stylistic features in Haneda's body of work through discussion and selected film clips. The lecture will highlight her contribution to Japanese documentary filmmaking and argue for her recognition as a major figure in world cinema whose films remain powerful testimonies to a Japan in transition. The lecture is based on their edited book The Documentary Cinema of Haneda Sumiko: Japan in Transition through Gender, Arts, Nature and Society (Routledge, 2026).

A screening of Into the Picture Scroll Tale: The Yamanaka Tokiwa Story (Haneda Sumiko, 2004), followed by a Q&A, will be presented at The Japan Research Centre, SOAS University of London on Wednesday 18 November 2026 at 5.00pm. For more information and to book, please visit the SOAS website.

Marcos Centeno-Martín is Associate Professor at the University of Valencia in Spain, where he teaches Film and Japanese Studies. Previously, Centeno held positions in the UK, as the Japanese Programme director at Birkbeck, University of London, and as lecturer for the Department of Japan and Korea at SOAS University of London, where he coordinated the MA Global Cinemas and the Transcultural. His main research interests revolve around Japanese documentary film, transculturality, minorities and memory. He is PI of the research project TRAMEVIC (Transnational Memories in East Asian Visual Culture) and member of the project NUREVIO: New Paradigms in the Cultural Representation of Spaces of Mass Violence: Viewing and Narrating the Twentieth Century from the Twenty-First, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Irene González-López is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on postwar cinema and issues related to gender and sexuality, both in front and behind the camera. Irene has published widely on the representation of sex work, on women authorship, and on adaptations and remakes in Japanese cinema. Recent publications include: ‘How to sell a remake: The Gate of Flesh media franchise” (2023); “‘Female Director’: Discourses and Practices in Contemporary Japan” (co-authored, 2022); and Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity (Edinburgh University Press, co-edited, 2018).

Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández holds a PhD from the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain, where she completed a dissertation on female authorship and representation in the films directed by Tanaka Kinuyo. She has been a visiting researcher at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo and at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research spans women filmmakers in Japan, gender representations in East Asian cultures and transnational film exchanges between Japan and Latin America. She is Head of Communications at The Japan Society.

If you have any questions, please call The Japan Society office on 020 3075 1996 or email events@japansociety.org.uk.

Image: Women’s College in the Village (Mura no fujin gakkyū, Haneda Sumiko, 1957) © Kiroku Eiga Hozon Center (left); Haneda Sumiko during the shooting of The World of Dementia (Chihōsei rōjin no sekai, 1986) © Haneda Sumiko and Kanatasha (right).

Supported by the Toshiba International Foundation (TIFO)

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