Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in international in co-productions. (A Bloomsbury Translation)

FILMBLATT

Two acclaimed directors clash! An international star returns to his native soil! A future national icon debuts! Iris Haukamp captures the moment of such an excitement and retells the complicated behind-the-scene stories of the production of New Earth. What is revealed in this apparently microscopic analysis of one film is a more dynamic ideological and political battle over the authentic image of Japan.

Daisuke Miyao, Professor and the Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature, University of California, San Diego, USA

When the word 'scholarship' is used, this is the work to which it should be applied. Iris Haukamp has mined the archives in Japanese, German and English to produce not just the definitive study of a legendary film but brings much-needed attention to one of the most important efforts, fascinatingly failed though it was, in pre-WW II cinema among the Axis Powers. Under the direction of fabled filmmakers Itami Mansaku and Arnold Fanck, this is the film that made Hara Setsuko an abiding star and demonstrates how Japan has long been a foreigner's dream.

David Desser, Emeritus Professor of Cinema Studies, University of Illinois, USA

[The] book makes significant contributions to German-Japanese history and film studies.

German Studies Review