About the Producer

Producer Marty Gross  is a Canadian consulting producer for companies based in North America, Europe and Asia, with focus on Japanese art, film, theatre and crafts. His company, Marty Gross Film Productions, Inc. (founded in 1975), manages one of the most comprehensive websites devoted to films on Japanese cultural and historical subjects.

Since 1974, he has produced and directed films (including As We Are, Potters at Work, The Lovers’ Exile), restored archival films on Japanese arts and crafts (such as The Leach Pottery, Maskiko Village Pottery, Japan 1937), conducted numerous interviews, produced documentaries and coordinated publication of books on the history of Japanese cinema.

Film restorer, Historian

In 1975, Gross earned a Canada Council Travel Award to visit British potter Bernard Leach in St. Ives, Cornwall UK to obtain footage Leach shot during his 1934–35 travels to Japan and Asia. He restored the Leach films with assistance from the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, the National Museum of Man, Ottawa and The Joint Centre on Modern East Asia, Toronto. In addition to the film footage from 1934–35, Janet Darnell Leach gave Gross the original 16mm copy of a film called, The Leach Pottery, 1952. In 2006 Gross began preparations to restore and re-release this film. He contacted American potter Warren MacKenzie suggesting that he record narration for the restored version of the film since MacKenzie had been at The Leach Pottery 1949–1952. Gross finished the film’s restoration adding a narrative by MacKenzie about his time with Leach. The DVD version includes footage of Leach shot by MacKenzie in the 2010 released DVD, The Leach Pottery, 1952. In 2011, he discovered that Bernard Leach had made an audio recording to accompany the film, perhaps in the 1960s, so the second edition of The Leach Pottery, 1952 includes the voice-over commentaries of both Leach and MacKenzie. The DVD has been released in both English and Japanese editions.

In 1984, he was commissioned by the Japan Foundation, in Tokyo to restore a series of 16mm pre-war films on the arts, crafts and theatre of Japan, originally produced by Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, (KBS) 1934–39 and completed restoration two years later. Also he restored, Mashiko Village Pottery, Japan 1937 a film of critical importance to the history of crafts, subsequently acquired by major craft organizations worldwide. Mashiko Village Pottery was filmed at the workshop of Totaro Sakuma, where the renowned potter Shoji Hamada studied before establishing his own kiln in Mashiko. In 2007, he completed the 1956 film Gisei featuring Japanese Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, at the request of director Donald Richie, renowned expert on Japanese film and culture.

Gross is also coordinating and producing the Mingei Film Archive Project, a digitization effort to restore and archive documentary films from 1925 – 1976 of village craftspeople and the origins of the Mingei (Folk Craft) Movement. Gross discovered the films and is also enhancing and adding newly recorded oral histories he has produced of participants, or descendants of those appearing in the films. The archive has over 40 hours of previously unseen footage, and reveals village craftspeople as seen by Leach, Yanagi and Hamada as they developed ideas that changed the direction of hand-craftsmanship worldwide.

In 2021, Gross was appointed an Associate to The Archaeology Centre at the University of Toronto.

For more information about Marty Gross, visit his wikipedia page.