Extreme Private Eros: Love Song

A radically intimate documentary that shatters taboos by showing everything that was once considered obscene and shameful: genitals, pubic hair, sexual intercourse (involving a minor) with a black man and childbirth and the birth of a mixed-race child. But the real challenge for patriarchal, prudish Japan was the image of a woman depicted in the film: a bisexual, radical feminist, single mother and activist fighting for, among other things, the rights of prostitutes—a woman who wants to love, have sex and raise her child on her own terms. Twenty-six-year-old Miyuki Takeda, the director’s life partner and the mother of his son, was an independent woman desperate for freedom. In 1972, she decided to leave and take her son to Okinawa. Unable to accept that she was gone, the artist starts creating a story about what happened to her. Delving deep into the intimate world of his ex-partner, Kazuo Hara also creates, at the same time, an intriguing and no less intimate (and, above all, lacking in Japanese society in general) image of female experiences and conflicts. He also revealed on-screen his own emotions and his own ambiguous status: neither a witness nor a companion nor a man who wants to continue to use his camera to keep an eye on “his” woman.