Issue:
February 2026 | Film Committee
An infamous figure gets a compelling biodrama
Join the Film Committee at 6 pm on Monday, February 16 for Sachi Hamano’s Kaneko Fumiko, a stirring depiction of the infamous young woman who died 100 years ago in solitary confinement at Tochigi Women’s Prison. A nihilist who refused to compromise, Kaneko remains one of the most radical and unsettling figures in modern Japanese history. Hamano, who is best known as a prolific pink (erotic) film director, draws on trial records and Kaneko’s surviving tanka poems to create this unconventional biodrama illuminating her largely undocumented struggle. Denied legal status at birth and raised without a family register, Kaneko had been sent to colonial Korea, where she endured years of near-slavery as well as witnessing Japan’s brutal colonial rule and the Korean independence movement, before returning to Japan as a teen. Kaneko’s ideological journey—from Christianity to socialism to anarchism—ultimately led her to a fateful partnership with Korean nihilist Park Yeol. Kaneko Fumiko opens following the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, when the two are framed as conspirators in a plot to assassinate the Crown Prince, a fabrication used to legitimize the state-sanctioned violence against Koreans. Rather than plead innocence, Kaneko and Park accept the charge of high treason, transforming the courtroom into a battleground of ideas. Focusing on her final 121 days, the film movingly depicts Kaneko’s final confrontation with the Japanese state. Anchored by a searing performance from Nahana, Hamano paints a portrait of a woman who insisted that even death must remain an act of freedom. Both Hamano and Nahana will be on hand for a Q&A following the screening. (Kaneko Fumiko, Japan, 2026, 121 minutes, Japanese with English subtitles).
