ONLINE EVENT - The Japan Society Film Club: The New God directed by Yutaka Tsuchiya
Date
Wednesday 1 October 2025
Time
6.30pm (BST)
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Booking Details
Online meeting on Zoom
Please register for the meeting in advance from the link below. After registering, you will receive an automated confirmation email with meeting access details (please check your spam folder if you don't receive any emails).
Free for members of The Japan Society
Please remember to watch the film in advance.
The New God is available to watch on DAFilms through rental or with subscription.
Please help us to keep this event free and open to all!The Japan Society is a charity and its activities are made possible thanks to the support of its members. If you are planning to attend this event and are not a member (as an individual or through your employer), please consider becoming a member or making a donation if you can - the recommended donation is £5. Thank you!   |
For our film club in October we will discuss The New God, a 1999 documentary by Yutaka Tsuchiya.
The New God (新しい神様, Atarashii Kamisama, 1999) is a documentary capturing the unlikely interaction between the ultra-nationalist punk band Revolutionary Truth and a left-wing filmmaker who opposes the Emperor system. Through a series of tense yet comical exchanges, moments of mutual curiosity and ideological clash unfold. The film documents not only political confrontation but also the personal struggles of individuals seeking meaning and identity. Against the backdrop of fin-de-siècle Japan, it reveals a society marked by uncertainty and disconnection, where even opposing voices share a common desire for grounding in an era of rapid social and cultural change.
Yutaka Tsuchiya (1966-) is a Japanese documentary filmmaker and video artist and activist whose work experiments with social change utilising independent media. He founded the independent distribution network VideoAct! in 1998 to circulate socially engaged media. Tsuchiya first gained critical attention with The New God (1999), a video-diary documentary exploring dialogue between himself and a nationalist punk band, which received a FIPRESCI Special Mention at Yamagata and was screened in the Berlinale Forum. Subsequent works include the fiction-documentary hybrid Peep “TV” Show (2003) and GFP Bunny (2012), the latter awarded Best Picture in the Japanese Eyes section of the Tokyo International Film Festival.