My Love Has Been Burning (Waga Koi wa Moenu)

Dir. Kenji Mizoguchi. 1949, 96 mins. 35mm print from the Harvard Film Archive. With Kinuyo Tanaka, Ichiro Sugai, Mitsuko Mito, Kuniko Miyake. Mizoguchi gets in the trenches with the struggle for feminist self-determination in 1880s Japan with My Love Has Been Burning, which dramatically illustrates the feminist adage that “the personal is political.” Trailing a friend who has been sold into slavery, willful Eiko leaves her family home and relocates to Tokyo. There she begins to work with the opposition progressive party and falls in love with its leader, Kentaro Omoi. In years to come, Eiko and her friend will suffer untold brutality for the cause—yet when the progressives come into power, the issue of women’s rights has conveniently been forgotten.

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