Screening of Lily Festival (Yurisai) and Q&A Session with the Film’s Award-winning director Hamano Sachi

The novel this movie is based on is Lily Festival (Yurisai), a caustic and brightly humorous portrayal of the sexuality of elderly women. Written by MOMOTANI Hoko, a resident of Hokkaido, it won the Hokkaido Newspaper Literary Prize in 1999, and was published in book form by Kodansha in 2000.

The heroines of the story are seven women who range in age from 69 to 91. When an elderly ladies’ man moves into their old-fashioned apartment building, a tremendous commotion ensues. Utterly unlike a typically reticent Japanese man, this old fellow charms the women with graceful gestures and eloquent rhetoric. That these ladies are all taken in by this smooth-talking old fellow is due to the special circumstances of the elderly, which are different from the environment in which they fell in love in their youth: “The men die earlier, so when you get to this age, there are hardly any left.” “It’s not enough that they just be alive; they should be sexy too.”

The women of this film are bold and overflowing with energy. In Japan, desexualized ‘cute old ladies’ sometimes appear as an ideal representation of the aged, but the residents of Lily Festival’s apartment building are not pent up by the image of the ‘old lady.’ Once the gray-haired dandy has shown them the possibilities of sexuality, they dauntlessly break out of their shells and begin to act. This film portrays the lively reawakening of the sexual energies of old women who had been shackled by both oppression of women and discrimination against the elderly.

HAMANO Sachi had always wanted to work as a director. But in the 1960s, when she tried to get into the world of film-making, the Japanese movie business was a male-dominated society, and there were almost no studios willing to hire women as potential directors. However, in 1968 Hamano succeeded in finding work as an assistant director in independent production companies, and in 1971 she debuted as a director. In 1984 she founded her own production company, Tantansha. Since then, working as both producer and director, she has released over 300 low-budget adult films portraying sexuality from women’s perspectives, becoming one of the most popular and respected filmmakers in this genre. Throughout her career Hamano has maintained her philosophy of celebrating the sexuality of her heroines but not degrading their images, and her recent independent films have been widely supported in Japan by women’s and grass-roots groups. In 1998 she produced In Search of a Lost Writer (Dainanakankai hoko: Ozaki Midori o sagashite) which depicted the life and work of the forgotten female writer OZAKI Midori (1896-1971). Funding for this film was provided in part by donations from over 12,000 women from all over Japan. Hamano was awarded Japan’s 4th Women’s Culture Prize for Lost Writer in 2000; that same year she encountered MOMOTANI Hoko’s novel on elderly sexuality, Lily Festival (Yurisai), and determined to adapt it for the screen. The resulting feature film, completed in 2001, has been screened throughout Japan, and by invitation at film festivals elsewhere in Asia, North America, and Europe, including the International Tokyo Women’s Film Festival, the Montreal International Film Festival, and the International Women’s Film Festival in Turin, Italy, where it was awarded Second Prize in the Dramatic Features category.