'I hope it resonates': Japan filmmaker's look at voiceless women part of Hyannis movie fest

A former Cape Cod schoolteacher who has become a filmmaker in Japan will be part of a Hyannis Film Festival event for the second time in three months, premiering his latest film there Saturday as part of a three-day Movies on Main.

And in the days before the weekend screening, Steven J Martin and a small Japanese cast and crew will be filming at various Cape locations on his fifth movie — thanks to financing from a local fan of his work.

Martin’s “Anonymous Gods,” a Japanese-language film with English subtitles, will be shown from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 15 as one of eight film events for the Movies on Main festival being held at 529 Main St., event space that’s part of Sturgis Charter Public School in Hyannis. Martin’s movie is about four women, who are two couples and who have all somehow been deprived of their voice in Japanese society. In the film, they contemplate art, love and their futures, involving both motherhood and death.

Some people have categorized “Anonymous Gods” as an LGBTQ film, says Martin, noting that it might be more controversial in Japan, where there is less acceptance of homosexuality and no gay marriages allowed. But Martin, who is married to a woman, also sees the movie as an exploration of the nature of art.

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“I really, really want people to see this new movie. We just put so much work and love into it and tried so hard to make something (about) where we really are today, deep down, emotionally, socially, in a world of social media,” Martin said in a Zoom interview from Japan. “It's very much connected to identity, and can we love anymore — I hope it resonates, especially to adults. It’s a movie for adults who are lost in this world, the disconnect and where do we go from there.”

That may all be part of the conversation with Martin and cast members in attendance on Saturday. The group is also expected to show some of the new work they film in the week beforehand, for a film that Martin says will be a compilation of three separate Cape-centric stories, though performed in Japanese.

The rest of the fest

Beyond “Anonymous Gods,” Movies on Main will begin at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14 with the documentary “How to Dance in Ohio,” about families living with autism, which is now the inspiration for a Broadway-bound musical opening this month in previews at Syracuse Stage. Producers of the musical, who have Cape ties, according to festival Managing Director William Ferrall, will attend, and the screening is presented in association with FORWARD, a Cape nonprofit that develops and builds affordable, supportive housing for adults with autism and related disabilities.

The movie is also a preview to the festival's 2023 focus on neurodiversity, Ferrall says.

The schedule for Saturday’s other films: Noon, film and video shorts from the Cape and islands, including winners of this month’s Nantucket Shorts Festival; 2 p.m., “Fall River,”  the first two episodes of a four-part 2021 documentary about 1970s Satanic cult murders, with some of those involved in attendance; and 7 p.m., “Last Night in Rozzie,” a 2021 film about a New York lawyer who returns to his Boston hometown to reunite his dying friend with his young son, and must confront his own childhood trauma. Attending will be co-producer Kris Myer, an associate producer on several movies by the Farrelly brothers and producer of the Casey Sherman-Dave Wedge podcast.

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The Sunday programs will happen in collaboration with the family-friendly Hyannis Open Streets festival that shuts down Main Street to vehicular traffic so visitors can enjoy the outdoors and village businesses. That day’s movies will be documentaries about the environment, with the first two programs including one main film and other short ones.

At noon, the main feature is the new “Great Ponds,” about environmental challenges to the health of freshwater ponds on Martha’s Vineyard and the Cape, with island filmmaker Ollie Becker joining via Zoom; 2 p.m., the main feature is “Tide to Table: The Remarkable Journey of Oysters” (2022), about oyster farming on Long Island, the Cape and elsewhere by Pace University, with professor Maria Luskay in attendance; and 5 p.m., “Last of the Right Whales” (2021), a 90-minute documentary about saving the shrinking population of Atlantic right whales, with a Cape-based marine biology scientist scheduled to attend.

A weekend patron pass of $100 allows admission to all Movies on Main films; individual film tickets are $15 each; https://www.eventbrite.com/d/ma--barnstable-town/hyannis-film-festival/.

Martin’s Must See Pictures

The Hyannis festival last brought Martin and some of his collaborators from Japan in July, when he premiered his “Unplayed Lullaby” film to an audience that Martin says was enthusiastic enough to extend what was going to be a 20-minute Q&A to 80 minutes. He and his actresses were particularly gratified at the lively exchange, he says, because it’s customary in Japan to be silent while watching and responding to a film.

“So it was really, really powerful for us to get that response,” he says.

Martin’s movie, he says, caught the attention of audience member Bob Wilds, an entrepreneur, environmentalist and writer who retired to Mashpee after being a whale watch captain in Barnstable years ago. Wilds asked Martin about turning his memoir of essays, “Wild Bubbles,” into a movie and Martin says his Must See Pictures has used that and its themes as jumping-off points for the new anthology.

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Filming was due to take place Oct. 9-14 in various parts of Provincetown (including a cemetery and the Pilgrim Monument), the Gray’s Beach Boardwalk in Yarmouth Port, other beaches in Truro, and on Hyannis streets. The three short films that will be used to create a whole are “Postcards from a Strange Place Called 'Love,'” written and directed by Martin; “Bandage,” written and directed by Kozue Ito; and “Forgotten Cape,” written and directed by Shota Uchiyama.

Martin, who first lived on the Cape during high school, moved back and forth between the United States (including teaching stints at Sturgis and Cape Cod Academy) and Japan before staying in Tokyo as of 2016. He now teaches there when he’s not making movies, and established Must See Pictures in late 2020 for his dream of writing, directing and producing his own feature films. His first, “Once Upon a Time in Tokyo,” was released on Vimeo and played at film festivals in 2021.

Since then, he and collaborators Ito and Nana Akuzawa, with grants from the Japanese government that Ito has obtained in part through her theater company, have worked on three feature films, two theatrical plays and one short film. Martin says he connected with the Hyannis Film Festival after a Cape friend suggested emailing Ferrall and sharing his work.

That connection resulted in the July screening and Martin’s first trip back to the United States in about four years. “It was very exciting for us, especially for my cast because we worked really hard on the project for about a year together,” Martin says. “We did it as a stage play, first in the theater in Tokyo, then we produced it as a film together. … So (the Hyannis showing) was quite an event for us and (the movie) is going to open in Tokyo this winter.”

Spotlight on women unusual for Japan

Martin, who will make his acting debut in the movie currently in production, has worked exclusively with women in his films and plays — in part because of how much he admires and respects his collaborators, he says, and in part because of Japan’s patriarchal society.

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“I really like working, first of all, with these actresses. They're intelligent, they're powerful, they're opinionated, they drive me crazy in the best way. They really push, they really fight. I can't stand people who just wait for you to tell them what to do. … I'd rather people come in and ask questions and the people I work with are powerful,” Martin says. “The result, I think you’ll see (in ‘Anonymous Gods') is because of them, because they pushed it and pushed it.”

The men in Japan discourage the voices of foreigners, Martin says, so he says he empathizes with the reduced roles and rights of women in that country.

“As a foreigner in Japan, you don't have much of a voice … because it always comes back to ‘he’s not from here,’ and it's an incredibly frustrating, demoralizing thing,” Martin says. “And that's kind of the reason that I got into (filmmaking) because I thought maybe I could have a voice if I just create something, even if it's anonymous.”

When he started writing, he says, he realized that because men make the rules in Japan, there was no struggle to write about related to men. “And without struggle, there's no story. And it was dull,” Martin says. “But the women always had these secrets, these mysteries, there were these desires, these dilemmas. And (within the women in his wife’s family) the stories were just coming out and it was like, 'Wait a minute, this is interesting' because the voice they didn’t have was the voice I didn’t have.

“When we did ‘Unplayed Lullaby’ in Hyannis, there were a lot of women who came up to me saying ‘You really understand women, you have a woman’s voice,’ but I’m just writing (about) myself” in Japan, he says.

Women have also wanted to work on his films, Martin says, because there are fewer roles in Japanese entertainment for actresses who are not young or considered cute, or who aren’t satisfied with wife and mother roles.

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For the new film being shot on Cape Cod this week, another aspect that Japanese audiences won’t be used to besides strong women roles is the setting.

“I think the Cape is just gorgeous in October. That was one of the reasons we wanted to take advantage of this and say maybe we could film it (on the Cape) in the very flattering light,” he says. ”Even though there are Gothic elements (to the stories), people would say ‘Wow, where is this place? It's beautiful.’ I think (that will be true) especially in Japan when they see it, because Cape Cod is not known here at all. They know Boston, and that’s it.”

Contact Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll at kdriscoll@capecodonline.com. Follow on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Hyannis movie festival: Japan film on women, right whales, autism