Amateur in the Moon

A pioneer of amateur cinema in Asia, Yoshikawa Hayao (1890–1959) wrote over 160 books to share his passion for moving images in the 1930s. Years later, he revisits an unrealised youthful dream: a science-fiction film set on the Moon. Inspired by Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon, the search becomes a return to the spirit of amateur filmmaking.

Huang Pang-chuan & Chunni Lin: ‘This film was shot entirely on 9.5mm film, a format that has vanished for nearly half a century. First introduced a century ago, 9.5mm film sparked a wave of amateur filmmaking, inspiring the creation of countless cine-clubs across Japan and Taiwan. Yoshikawa Hayao was among the most passionate advocates of this movement; through his wide network of friends and prolific writings, he helped advance a vision of ‘cinematic democratisation’. Yet the works of those early amateurs, created entirely on reversal film, left no duplicates and have since disappeared with time. This film revives that lost spirit, using the same tools, the same format, and the same handmade process, to summon back a forgotten golden age of small-gauge cinema, letting the faint light of film history shimmer once more today.’