The Japanese film industry has made movies featuring the Ainu, indigenous people who now live mostly in Hokkaido, but with Japanese actors in the Ainu roles. In his second feature “Ainu Mosir” (2020), Hokkaido-born Takeshi Fukunaga used a nonprofessional Ainu cast to explore the issue of identity within the setting of an Ainu village that caters to tourists, while depicting the struggles of the characters to preserve and pass on customs to the next generation.
In his documentary “Ainu Puri,” Fukunaga takes a different approach by focusing on one Ainu family whose young patriarch, Shigeki Amanai, is trying to live a traditionally Ainu life in Shiranuka, Hokkaido.
For both films, Fukunaga did the slow, difficult work of winning trust and cooperation so that his actors and subjects, as well as the wider Ainu community, would be comfortable with his camera and trust that he would represent them fairly and sympathetically.
