| 2001-07-27 | | | Japanese Panorama films announced! |
This year’s Japanese Panorama program, featuring new Japanese documentaries, includes nine titles, short and long, selected from an unprecedented number of entries. Whereas personal films generally tend to be introverted, this Japanese Panorama lineup presents films with an inner gaze but an outward energy that struggles to break ahead. The list follows this text.
Tsuma no Kao is a culmination of the filmmaker’s work about his wife who suffers from aftereffects of the atom bomb—ongoing work from over thirty years ago, when amateur film was hailed as “small-scale film.” The internal conflict between the couple is moving.
A female filmmaker who overcame eating disorder interviews friends who suffer from the ailment in Then, She Closes Another Eye.
An Error With Wings is the filmmaker’s personal search for her identity, made in collaboration with a 16mm camera crew.
When her best friend announces that she’s actually Korean, the young filmmaker is stupefied, and muses on the issue of her own identity in Tei-chan’s Roots. Will be screened together with 35.4 Degrees C, a personal short-short by the same filmmaker.
Issues of Japan, Korea, and Asia are discussed in Nihon Shinju, featuring interviews with art critic Hariu Ichiro.
Shot on 8mm, Dialogue 1999 profiles the filmmaker herself through her relations with others.
The director of Takashi and His Friends, who is physically disabled, records the lives of his friends and their instructor at their work place.
Kobayashi Shigeru’s A Patch of Blue Sky proposes a hopeful and joyous answer to master director Yanagisawa Hisao’s lifelong questioning through his films about the disabled.
(MASUYA Shuichi, Japanese Panorama programmer)
Japanese Panorama Lineup
- Tsuma no Kao
Dir: Kawamoto Akito, Hiroshima
Video / 114 min - Then, She Closes Another Eye
Dir: Negoro Yu, Tokyo
Video / 53 min - An Error With Wings
Dir: Aramaki Ryoko, Tokyo
16mm / 38 min - Tei-chan’s Roots
Dir: Tanaka Miwa, Kyoto
Video / 14 min - 35.4 Degrees C
Dir: Tanaka Miwa, Kyoto
Video / 3 min - Nihon Shinju
Dir: Oura Nobuyuki, Tokyo
Video / 106 min - Takashi and His Friends
Dir: Kihara Daigo, Niigata
Video / 31 min - Dialogue 1999
Dir: Inoue Akiko, Niigata
8mm / 38 min - A Patch of Blue Sky
Dir: Kobayashi Shigeru, Niigata
Video / 31 min