Films

Description

*SOUTHEAST ASIAN PREMIERE*

“This is a film directed by Tanaka Kinuyo, dedicated to all womankind. The pathos and intensity of women’s lives have never before been so revealed”. – extract from newspaper advertisement, Forever a Woman, SHINBUN Yomiuru, 1955

Based on the life of tanka poet, NAKAJO Fumiko (her biography ‘The Eternal Breasts’ serves as the film’s alternative title), Forever a Woman depicts a divorced mother of two whose rising literary fame cruelly intersects with a diagnosis of breast cancer, and a subsequent mastectomy. Struggling with her sense of womanhood, she forms an intimate relationship with a journalist, in a powerful act of self-reclamation and desire.

Sensuous and heartbreaking in equal measure, TANAKA’s third directorial feature is among her most personal works and is considered to be way ahead of its time for its frank depiction of a woman’s love and sexuality. Scripted by woman screenwriter TANAKA Sumie (who also wrote Girls of the Dark), the film can be read as a collaborative expression of intent to represent the subjective experience of a woman–as she is–liberated from the socially normative role of the wife/mother archetypes that TANAKA was all too familiar with portraying as an actress for male filmmakers. Like her protagonist, she reclaims her agency and perspective on her own terms via her authorial position as a director.