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Director: Otsuki Natsuko Cast, Photography: Nakatsu Tomotaka, Tanaka Yanbu, Otsuki Natsuko Suported by: Umano Noriko, Kyoto College of Art Visual Media Lab. 1995 / Color / Video / 34 min |
| Otsuki won the Grand Prix at the Pia film festival in 1995: the first time that this prize had gone to a work on video. The work was a fake "personal film," laying bare the truth and lies of the private documentary. Otsuki then had the duty of making a "film," but she found it hard to decide what she wanted to shoot. The film starts suddenly with a flirting scene on the street but it soon becomes clear that this scene is being directed by Otsuki. As she is talking with a young man, Otsuki abruptly reveals that her mother has terminal cancer. The scene goes on, ad-libbed by the director and the actor, accompanied by Otsuki's elusive whispering. At the same time we hear messages from the director's relatives on her answering machine, reporting that her mother's condition has taken a turn for the worse, and then that she has died. In the end Otsuki was only able to film her mother briefly. Saying, "I really did want to film my mother but everything I shot was a lie," she refuses to be filmed herself. While this film unfolds through the accumulation of impulses and whims that escape reality, it also shows Otsuki finding it almost impossible to deal with the capricious reality that is her mother's inescapable death. |