Archiving Japan's Mingei Movement with Marty Gross

Based in Toronto, Marty Gross has spent decades in the film industry as a producer and director. With a special focus on Japan, Marty’s films include Potters at Work, As We Are, and The Lovers’ Exile. For our purposes, Marty also founded and manages a project to restore, enhance, and preserve recordings that document the history of the Mingei Movement and its ongoing legacy in the world of contemporary ceramics. Established in the 1920s in Japan, the Mingei Movement championed the beauty of everyday, homemade objects. Over the past few years, Marty has been supervising the restoration and remastering of a vast collection of films from Japan, Korea, England, and the United States, covering the period from 1925-1976. In this conversation, he discusses pottery, filmmaking, the Mingei Movement, and the archive he is building at the intersection of these interests.