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Paper short abstract

This presentation analyzes Ainu Puri (2020) through Lewallen’s notion of “becoming Ainu,” which conceives Ainu identity as an intentional, fluid process. The film demonstrates this framework by depicting how a father and a son negotiate heritage and modernity, enacting indigeneity through lived practice.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines Takeshi Fukunaga’s documentary Ainu Puri (2024) as a reconfiguration of Ainu Indigenous representation in contemporary cinema. Drawing on Ann-Elise Lewallen’s concept of Ainu-ness as “becoming” (2016), it argues that the film moves beyond earlier ethnographic representations that constructed Ainu identity as a fixed state of being. Historically, films about the Ainu have privileged externally visible features through which Ainu identity is made visually recognizable, including ceremonial attire, rituals, dance, hunting, material culture, and other culturally marked practices. By treating these features as evidence of “authentic” Ainu-ness, such representations locate Indigenous identity in what can be seen and documented, often marginalizing experiences that fall outside this visual framework. Ainu Puri, by contrast, shifts the representation of Indigeneity from visual markers toward embodied and relational subjectivity. The film portrays Ainu identity as a chosen and ongoing process shaped by intergenerational relationships, care, grief, syncretic spirituality, economic aspirations, uncertainty, and everyday negotiation. Its intimate focus on Shigeki Amanai, his wife Aika, their children Motoki and Yoshiki, and their wider community places Ainu life within domestic and emotional spaces rather than isolating culture as spectacle. Through family relationships, memories, and acts of transmission, the documentary reveals Ainu-ness as continually performed, negotiated, and rearticulated. In this sense, Ainu Puri makes visible Ainu-ness as “becoming”: a relational and agential process through which Indigenous identity is continually constituted within contemporary mainstream society.