| Katsu Kanai | |
| Native Name: | ιδΊε |
| Native Name Lang: | ja |
| Birth Date: | 9 July 1936 |
| Birth Place: | Kanagawa, Japan |
| Nationality: | Japanese |
| Occupation: | Film director |
is a Japanese experimental and avant-garde film director. The Harvard Film Archive has called him "one of the most vital and inventive filmmakers in the history of Japanese underground film".[1]
Born the son of a farmer in Kanagawa Prefecture, Kanai graduated from the College of Art of Nihon University before finding work at Daiei Film.[2] [3] He later became a freelance cinematographer and founded Kanai Productions in 1968. His first film, The Deserted Archipelago (1969, aka The Desert Island) won the grand prix at the Nyon International Documentary Film Festival.[4] His second film, Good-Bye (1971), was the "first post-war, post-liberation Japanese feature to be filmed in Korea," and according to the film scholar Oliver Dew, illustrated "how a surreal, decided non-representational approach could block the determinations of cultural essentialism".[5] His 2003 work, Super Documentary: The Avant-Garde Senjutsu, was awarded the FIPRESCI award at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.[6] Kanai has been the subject of retrospectives at Oberhausen,[7] the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival,[8] and the Harvard Film Archive.