Cinema Signboards

A row of hand-painted cinema signboards line the side of a building in Yubari, Hokkaido. Each board advertises a different film, the titles painted in Japanese and Roman script. The films include Seven Samurai, Random Harvest, Death Wish, Kurobe no Taiyo, and Mabuta no Haha. The boards are weathered. The paint has chipped. The artwork ranges from professional cinema-poster style to more naive renderings. The boards are arranged across the long facade of what was once an active cinema street. The street is otherwise empty. Visitors during the festival weeks see the same signs, lit differently because more people are walking past them.

Yubari hosted the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival from 1990, originally as part of the city's tourism push to replace its lost coal-industry economy. The festival drew genre-film directors and audiences from Japan and overseas, and brought a brief annual pulse of activity to a town that was otherwise quiet. The hand-painted signboards along the cinema street were one of the visible features of the festival period. The festival ran into financial trouble during Yubari's 2007 bankruptcy and was suspended, but later restarted in modified form. The signboards in this photograph are part of the festival's permanent street signage, kept up between annual events.