Every artist goes through some rough patches during their career, but Masato Hara has spent years in the wilderness. After racking up massive debts to produce his 2013 feature “I Wish You Were Here,” the Kyoto-based director lost his home in a fire in 2018, taking his entire archive of work with it.
That included the master tape for his landmark documentary, “The First Emperor” (1973), a hallucinogenic exploration of filmmaking and Japanese mythology that in its original version ran to about eight hours.
Hara, who was 68 at the time of the fire, suffered burns while trying to rescue a hard disk containing his latest work. Fortunately, the rest of his family escaped unscathed, and his wife, Maori, had the presence of mind to start filming on her iPhone.