“These films maintained a distance from commercially orientated films and political propagandistic films, and instead pursued inner truth, meaning and freedom. You could say that, at the time, Film Andepandan was the only place where you could engage in such practices in Japan. The manifesto says it was "a free cinema that opposed commercially orientated films"; a personal cinema that opposed the films that got projected in cinemas on 35mm. The reason we were free was because we returned to our personal selves as our starting points and made the films as artists.”