Tarō Nakayama: Short Film Programme 2
The second short film programme brings together Nakayama’s acclaimed works, including the fiction shorts, Little Bear Story and On a Clear Autumn Day, that were screened overseas in the early 1960s. Highlighting his range across fiction and documentary, the programme concludes with The Travelling Actors, a documentary on a travelling theatre troupe that functions in part as a portrait of actress Misuko Chikushi. The work is centred on artistic practice and is widely regarded as the pinnacle of his documentary work.
煙の見える海 (The Sea Where Smoke Can Be Seen, 1953)
Runtime: 16 minutes
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Rating: Exempted from classification
Synopsis
An early experiment work by Nakayama, the film follows a boy playing in the sand on a beach. He notices smoke rising from the slag heap of a nearby coal mine. A young woman appears before him and speaks gently to him. In her, he glimpses the image of his deceased mother, though she relates to him like a sister. The next day, he returns to the same spot, waiting patiently for her to reappear, only to find a marble buried in the sand.
仔熊物語 (Little Bear Story, 1956)
Runtime: 23 minutes
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Rating: Exempted from classification
Synopsis
Considered Nakayama’s masterpiece and awarded at the Festival International du Film Amateur in Cannes, Little Bear Story opens with a mother telling a story to her son, who struggles to fall asleep. The narrative explores themes of maternal love and independence, unfolding through bear puppets of a cub and its mother. The puppets were handmade by Nakayama’s wife, and the couple constructed an elaborate diorama in their home for the film’s production.
秋晴れの日に (On a Clear Autumn Day, 1955)
Runtime: 14 minutes
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Rating: Exempted from classification
Synopsis
A young female server who attempts to return a souvenir left behind by a group of upper-class women, inadvertently reveals her own self-consciousness and inner life, unfolding through a reflective monologue on social status and self-worth. Considered a monumental work in Nakayama’s development towards narrative storytelling, the film won the top prize in a small-gauge film competition in Japan.
Long unavailable due to the poor condition of its surviving print, the film was recently made accessible again following the successful digitisation of the surviving 8mm print.
旅役者 (The Travelling Actors, 1958)
Runtime: 30 minutes
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Rating: PG
Synopsis
Awarded at the Festival International du Film Amateur in Cannes in 1962, four years after its completion, The Travelling Actors centres on Misuko Chikushi, a travelling actor of Russian descent and the blue-eyed leader of a theatre troupe. The documentary follows the troupe and their performances, while offering an intimate glimpse of Chikushi’s life as a mother.
A FOCUS ON TARO NAKAYAMA
Born in 1917 in Fukuoka, Japan, Tarō Nakayama began making home movies in the 1930s using his father’s Pathé-Baby camera. Trained as a medical doctor, he opened a clinic in 1951 while pursuing filmmaking with 8mm equipment that he acquired in 1952.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he independently produced fiction and documentary works and mentored local amateur filmmakers. His film Little Bear Story and the documentary The Travelling Actors received awards at the Festival International du Film Amateur in Cannes in 1960 and 1962, respectively. From the 1970s, he made 16mm documentaries commissioned by institutions including Kyushu University and the Fukuoka Prefecture Board of Education. He was awarded the Fukuoka City Cultural Award in 1985. He passed away in 1992.
Largely unseen outside of Japan, Nakayama’s works are presented here for the first time in newly digitised versions with English subtitles. Accompanying the screenings is a talk by Dr. Mark Player that traces Nakayama’s life in amateur filmmaking.
This screening is part of the programme Reciprocal 2026. For more screenings of this programme. Please click here.
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