According to Scott McDonald, Kazuo Hara’s films “pushed the limits of the filmable”. In its exploration of family, feminism and sex, Extreme Private Eros is one of the great filmed autobiographies. The main character is Miyuki Takeda, the ex-wife of the filmmaker and the mother of his son, a bisexual feminist activist who decided to leave him and go to Okinawa to live without dependence on a man and explore new ways of life. When she called him to film their child’s birth, the filmmaker set out for Okinawa and filmed her for two years in 16mm, with a hand-held camera: “The only way to keep the relationship was to make a film”, says Hara in a voiceover at the start. Still in love, obsessive and jealous, he portrayed Miyuki while she was in a relationship first with a woman and then with an Afro-American soldier, with whom she was to have a child: “I never understood why she left me and, somehow, my way of finding out was to film her; we managed to communicate through the camera, and that helped me understand what had happened.”
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, 1974, 16 mm, 88 min, O.V. with Spanish subtitles. 18 years and over.
Thanks to: Fundación Japón.
