Don't get it twisted: Yumika Hayashi is way more than just a porn star. She's a Rorschach test, film theory with curves, her screen image throwing off endless refractions within the hearts of those who knew her, loved her, or just got off to her. The "iron woman" of Japanese erotic film, best known for critically-acclaimed pink eiga Lunchbox, Hayashi died in 2005 at age 35, but in Annyong Yumika, the new documentary by Tetsuaki Matsue (Live Tape), Yumika's legend is reborn, her passion made immortal.

A personal friend of Yumika's, the Korean-born Matsue transposes their dual quests for identity onto his auteurist autopsy of her obscure Korean-Japanese production, Junko: Story of a Tokyo Housewife, while simultaneously analyzing her impact on her colleagues, her lovers and her audience. Indie darling Katsuyuki Hirano filmed his affair with Yumika for posterity, while AV porn giant Company Matsuo's devotion is etched into celluloid with his softcore "love poem," the unforgettably-titled Hardball Penis, and his mournful memorial by the railroad tracks where he and Yumika shot the video is undeniably touching. Even the grizzled old cameraman who's seen it all laments her passing: "There aren't any true stars in this field now...they're not bigger than life anymore."

Was Yumika real or Memorex; alive and in love, or just on-camera? The shifting layers of reality present her as a subjective enigma, blurring the lines between the secrets in Yumika's real life and the truths laid bare from reel to reel. Seeking to reconcile her life with his art and see which imitates which, Matsue gathers the mourners and reconfigures Junko’s ending as a seance to raise the dead. "No one can own her," one of Junko's lovers explains. "We have to let her be free." For Yumika Hayashi, this is both an epitaph and a mission statement.