The film "Rikyu" was produced in 1989 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Sen no Rikyu's death, and depicts Sen no Rikyu's life as a tea master.

Sen no Rikyu was a tea master who lived in the 16th century. He is called the "tea saint" as a person who highly embodied the wabi aesthetic sense and is one of the most important figures in Japanese cultural history. The film was directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, a Japanese avant-garde ikebana master, and written by contemporary artist Genpei Akasegawa, a unique duo.

In the Azuchi-Momoyama period that emerged after the Warring States period, amidst the power struggles of the warlords Oda Nobunaga, Akechi Mitsuhide, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Sen no Rikyu devoted himself to exploring his own world of tea ceremony and persisted in his own way of life and beauty. This work dramatically depicts the conflict between Rikyu, the embodiment of beauty and knowledge, and Hideyoshi Toyotomi, a man of immense power and yet crude, who looked at Rikyu with envy and jealousy.

1989 Montreal World Music Festival Best Artistic Achievement Award winner.

35mm print courtesy of the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute.

Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1989, 120 min, 35mm, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. With Rentaro Mikuni, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Yoshiko Mita.

Screening will be conducted with Japanese audio and English subtitles.

Ticket holders for this event receive complimentary admission to the current gallery exhibition "Refashioning: CFGNY and Wataru Tominaga" prior to screening. https://www.japansociety.org/gallery/refashioning/