July 4 – August 18

A summer long feast of great Japanese classics, from the familiar – such masters as Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Shindo, and Imamura – to the less known (e.g. the splendid documentaries of Sumiko Haneda), many of them in new prints, all imported from Japan for this special event.  

2008 is a year of many cinematic centenaries, but even the keenest Toronto cinephile might be unaware of one that is immensely important to us: that of the birth of Madame Kashiko Kawakita. Long a fixture and icon on the international festival scene, always resplendent in her trademark kimono in the hurly burly of Cannes and Berlin, Madame Kawakita was responsible for many of the series of classic Japanese cinema that made their way to North America, and to such Toronto venues as the Ontario Film Institute, precursor to Cinematheque Ontario, Harbourfront, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. With her husband, Nagamasa Kawakita, Madame Kawakita started the Japan Film Library Council in 1960, which distributed thematic series of Japanese classics throughout the world. Any local cinephile will tell you how anticipated and invaluable series such as “The Family in Japanese Cinema” and “Japanese Literature into Film” were, introducing Toronto audiences to films and directors we had only ever encountered in books on Japanese cinema, if at all. Without the Kawakitas, it is safe to say, Toronto’s film scene would have been greatly diminished, and their legacy continues to this day.   

A personal memory. On my first trip to Japan, I was led through the narrow passageway off Ginza in pouring rain, to be ushered into the offices of the Kawakita Institute. I was bearing a gift highly unusual for the circumstance, not the usual smoked salmon or maple syrup everyone advises you to take to Japan – proverbial coals to Newcastle, as it turned out – but a gauche, self-promotional present: a Cinematheque Ontario sweatshirt with its big, off-kilter purple star, then our trademark, waddling its way down the bleached cotton expanse. When Madame Kawakita entered, all elegance and solicitude, and accepted the gift, she immediately displayed the grace for which she was known. “Ah!,” she sighed, inspecting