Screening with Natsuko’s Adventure in Hokkaido
Dir: Genjiro Saegusa
Scr: Chiaki Tsukuda
Cinematographer: Sukeshige Urushiyama
Cast：Fukui Matsunosuke, Shizuko Takizawa, Tachibana Hoshiko
The senninbari, or one thousand-stitch belt, is a sash worn by Japanese soldiers in World War II as a momento of the endless longings of the women of their families who made them. Filmed in the same year as the Second Sino-Japanese War, The Thousand-Stitch Belt is the oldest surviving Japanese coloured sound film, made using the American Cinecolor two-colour system by the production company Dainihon tennenshoku eiga seisakujo (Greater Japan Natural Color Productions), a pioneer of colour cinema and the first company to adopt the Multicolor process in Japan. An incomplete, 20-minute nitrate colour positive was discovered at Moscow’s Gosfilmofond archive. Staff from IMAGICA and IMAGICA West in Japan scanned the severely damaged print on site at Moscow, produced a 4K version and devised a new method of digital restoration by applying an innovative system of Look Up Tables that analysed photochemical simulations data to identify colour that cannot be expressed in a two-colour system and keep that range from being picked up in colour grading, so as to retrieve the colour of the film.