Located in the Momochihama section of Sawara Ward, the Fukuoka City Public Library consists of three sections: a library, a city archive, and a film archive. The library has 1.2 million volumes, a wide selection of weekly publications, and 44 national and 18 international newspapers. The city archive holds microfilms of materials dating from the Meiji period. But the film archive is worthy of particular note. There the library collects and stores valuable movies from throughout Asia with the objective of becoming a film archive for the continent. It also collects and stores Japanese films with a close connection to Fukuoka – Hakata, as well as experimental works. It is truly a repository of video culture for later generations.
The museum’s film collection comes from a wide range of countries and territories, including China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, as well as more obscure works from Cambodia, Turkey, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. It has well-known Asian films, classic works, and films screened at the Focus on Asia Fukuoka International Film Festival. The Cine-la theater has become an important city asset whose primary objective is to make the roughly 900 films in the collection widely accessible to the city’s residents. The theater, which has 242 seats and requires the purchase of a ticket to attend, was opened in June 1996. It shows films nearly every day in programs that are changed monthly.
One special program was called the South Korean Film Festival 1946-1996. This commemorated the museum’s opening, and showed South Korean movies that were internationally successful in the 1980s. Since then, they’ve held programs for postwar Chinese films, Mongolian films, and Indonesian films. They’ve also held special programs honoring writers, actors, and directors, including novelist Seicho Matsumoto, actress and director Kinuyo Tanaka, and director Kaneto Shindo.
Two special programs are scheduled for August to coincide with summer vacation. The first, which runs until Sunday the 8th, is for children’s movies and animations. It will trace the history of the Sakura Motion Picture Co., Ltd., which has produced many exceptional cultural and educational films. The period from Wednesday the 11th to Saturday the 28th will be devoted to films from Hong Kong. It will include Bruce Lee’s last movie, Enter the Dragon, a work by film maker Tsui Hark, popular in the 1980s, called Peking Opera Blues, and Project A2, directed by and starring the world-famous Jackie Chan. With an admission price of ￥500 to ￥600 for adults and ¥400 to ¥500 for students, it’s a real bargain! www.cinela.com
Originally published in Fukuoka Now magazine (fn140, Aug. 2010)
