"neo-eiga: New Japanese Cinema"

DATE:	Friday-Sunday, September 17-19, 2004
PLACE:	Pacific Film Archive Theater
FORMAT:	Film festival
SPONSOR:	Pacific Film Archive, Consulate General of Japan, San Francisco; The Japan Foundation; NAATA; Institute of East Asian Studies; and Japan Society of Northern California

Join us for Bay Area premieres of diverse, award-winning works that illuminate the multiple realities of twenty-first-century Japan.

The fourth neo-eiga festival brings a new film by a major sixties New Wave director, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida, together with works by exciting younger talents and an influential independent film producer-director. These recent films all explore contemporary characters and modern dilemmas, but represent varied relationships to the past; the perspective of history contrasts with the eternal present of the Internet.

Schedule of Films

For information on ticket sales, please call 510.642.1412 or visit http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/ pfa_programs/; for advance tickets (charge-by-phone), call 510.642.5249.

Friday, September 17, 2004

7:00 p.m.

Bokunchi — My House

Junji Sakamoto (Japan, 2002)

(Bokunchi). A high heel smashing through rotted wood, and the advice "live with it" uttered on a sinking ship, appropriately begin Junji Sakamoto's not-so-nostalgic look at small-town life and the children's dreams that live and drown in it. Little Nita is a hopelessly cute seven-year-old living in a backwater fishing village where incompetent glue-sniffing gangsters, scrap-gathering old men, and cat-collecting old women are the only role models around. Abandoned by his mother, Nita is cared for by his brother, who's busy working his way up the preteen yakuza ladder, and by his sex-worker elder sister. Sakamoto, whose debut Knock Out and recent films Face and KT mark his wide stylistic range, generates a nostalgia for childhood life as warm as it is crowd-pleasing. But Bokunchi's cute characters and sly observational humor also underline a bleaker reality, one that needs to be escaped rather than embraced. Like Nita says, "normal" is "a bowl of warm rice," but not much else. — Jason Sanders

Written by Isamu Uno, based on the comic by Rieko Saibara. Photographed by Norimichi Kasamatsu. With Arisa Mizuki, Yuma Yamoto, Yuki Tanaka, Claude Maki. (116 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Micott & Basara Inc.)

---

9:30 p.m.

Peep "TV" Show

Yutaka Tsuchiya (Japan, 2003)

Winner of the Rotterdam Film Festival's International Critic's Prize, Peep "TV" Show rages forth from Japan's dizzying Shibuya underground like a Dostoyevskian screed for the twenty-first century, where hidden webcams, lost youth, televisual violence, and girls dressed as goth Lolitas merge to embrace, or annihilate, the voyeurism of contemporary culture. Two street kids, the nihilistic Hasegawa (looking like a missing Ramone brother) and the suicidal Moe (looking like a punked-out Alice in Wonderland), set up an Internet site that begins by posting 9/11 footage, then branches out to include spy-cam shots, animal deaths, and necrophilia. Turning viewers into the viewed, and vice versa, their "peep TV" site becomes a mass movement, a space for those seeking "reality," or seeking to avoid it. "We have been robbed of our own reality," director Tsuchiya (whose A New God played in our 2002 neo-eiga series) writes. "Are you a spectator of the rerun, or are you a member of the cast? Or are you really here at all?" — Jason Sanders

Written by Tsuchiya, Karin Amamiya. Photographed by Masaki Ninomiya. With Takayuki Hasegawa, Shiori Gechov, Akiko Ueda, Risako. (98 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, DV-Cam, From Yutaka Tsuchiya)

Saturday, September 18, 2004

5:00 p.m.

Shara

Naomi Kawase (Japan, 2003)

(Sharasoju). Director Naomi Kawase made a sensational debut when her film Suzaku won the Cannes Camera d'or in 1997. With Shara, she returns to Nara, the site of that film (and her hometown), to present a "love letter to the community," a work in which "joyful Japanese values shine brightly" (Variety). On the day of the Jizo Festival, a little boy disappears, leaving a family in shock. Five years later, his body is finally discovered, and the world slowly, hesitatingly moves forward, with new loves beginning, another festival arriving, and a new life starting. Like Aoyama's Eureka and Kore-eda's Distance, Shara examines personal loss and how individuals can overcome unfathomable grief, but unlike those films focuses on how friendships, neighbors, and family serve as a source of comfort and, finally, healing. To further the film's extraordinary feeling of realism and community, Kawase relocated her cast and crew to Nara months before the shoot, "to come to know the town...so as to better feel their role." — Jason Sanders

Written by Kawase. Photographed by Yutaka Yamazaki. With Kohei Fukunaga, Yuka Hyoudo, Kawase, Katsuhisa Namase. (99 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, 35mm, Color, From Pyramide International)

---

7:00 p.m.

Ramblers

Nobuhiro Yamashita (Japan, 2003)

(Riarizumu no yado). A road movie without a car, or a road, Ramblers continues director Nobuhiro Yamashita's (No One's Ark) series of deadpan comedies of youth trying to find a future, or at least a clue. Acclaimed as Japan's Jim Jarmusch, Yamashita makes films about his generation, but the characters contained therein — hapless people caught in dead-end towns, with dead-end jobs and no-end embarrassments — remain universally endearing. Two young slackers travel to a small tourist town to meet a mutual friend, but when the friend never arrives the two strangers find themselves stranded. Stuck on their own private lonely planets, too lazy to explore, they instead fantasize about movies they're never going to make, schemes they're never going to begin, and girls they're certainly never going to seduce. Hapless encounters with locals stress their comical inability to fit in; they are strangers in a strange land, with everywhere to go but nowhere to stay, dreaming of something better, too lost to find it. — Jason Sanders

Written by Kosuke Mukai, Yamashita, based on a manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge. Photographed by Ryuta Kondo. With Keishi Nagatsuka, Hiroshi Yamamoto, Machiko Ono. (83 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Bitters End Inc.)

---

8:50 p.m.

Akame 48 Waterfalls

Genjiro Arato (Japan, 2003)

(Akame shijuyataki shinjumisui). Worlds collide when an upper-class writer takes refuge among the denizens of a seedy flophouse in this directoral entry from Genjirou Arato, longtime producer for Seijun Suzuki and Junji Sakamoto. "Thru me you pass into the city of woe," reads the cheery blackboard welcome at Amagasaki Railway Station, and such is the case for recent arrival Yoichi Ikushima (Takijiro Onishi), who quickly lands a room in a boarding house filled with end-of-the-line prostitutes, the dying, and the walking dead. "You're a pretty thing," someone cackles through misshapen teeth at Ikushima and his obviously patrician cheekbones. But Ikushima wants nothing to do with anyone until he meets Aya (Shinobu Terajima, Vibrator), the mistress of a tattoo artist and a woman with a death wish as radiant as Ikushima's own. With gorgeous CinemaScope images capturing each slow-burning moment of its characters' doomed lives and loves, Akame is a tribute to classic melodrama, whether 1950s cinema or Edo-period plays. — Jason Sanders

Written by Toya Suzuki, based on the novel by Chokitsu Kurumatani. Photographed by Norimichi Kasamatsu. With Takijiro Onishi, Shinobu Terajima, Michiyo Okusu, Yuya Uchida. (159 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, 'Scope, From Tohokushinsha Film Corporation)

Sunday, September 19, 2004

2:00 p.m.

Red Persimmons

Shinsuke Ogawa, Peng Xiaolian (Japan, 2001)

(Manzan benigaki). Elegant as a print by Hokusai, Red Persimmons is the fruit of a posthumous collaboration between the late Shinsuke Ogawa and his Chinese disciple Peng Xiaolian, who combined footage shot in 1984–85 with her own additions some 15 years later. Their documentary is a study in local knowledge — the cultivation and harvest of persimmons in tiny Kaminoyama. Highly astringent when picked, these recalcitrant fruits are clipped, sorted, peeled, and left to dry, before being packaged as candy-sweet delicacies. Human industry and ingenuity is the film's true subject. One woman recounts with gratitude how, when she couldn't master her mother-in-law's peeling method, her late husband devised a special knife to save her thumb from being cut repeatedly. The fabrication of a mechanical peeler from bicycle gears forms a separate chapter, with different villagers taking credit for the innovation. The film is a moving revelation of a microcosm soon to vanish. — Leslie Camhi, Village Voice

Photographed by Masaki Tamura, Jong Lin. (90 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, 16mm, From Planet Bibliothèque de Cinéma)

---

4:00 p.m.

Women in the Mirror

Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida (Japan, 2002)

Introduced by Daisuke Miyao

(Kagami no onnatachi). Two legends return in this meditative, moving work on the legacy of Hiroshima: director Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida, whose Eros + Massacre is a monument of the Japanese New Wave, and actress Mariko Okada, whose credits include the films of Naruse, Ozu, and Itami. Okada stars as Mrs. Kawase, an elderly woman haunted by memories both distant and present: of Hiroshima (she lost her husband there, and barely survived herself), and of her amnesiac missing daughter, who may have finally reappeared. The two women, accompanied by Kawase's granddaughter Natsuki and her modern concerns of overseas boyfriends and corporate jobs, return to Hiroshima, the site of their memories and forgettings. Melancholy and mysterious, as graceful in form as it is respectful in content, Women in the Mirror uses its silences to reflect on traumas both public and personal, and as a way for the audience to, as Yoshida says, "reconsider the Hiroshima they carry within them, and freely establish a dialogue in this communion with its victims." — Jason Sanders

Written by Yoshida. Photographed by Masao Nakabori. With Mariko Okada, Yoshiko Tanaka, Sae Issiki, Hideo Moroto. (129 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Gendai-sha)

---

7:00 p.m.

A Woman's Work

Kentaro Otani (Japan, 2002)

(Travail). A Woman's Work tackles the changing dynamics between men and women — and their jobs — with an improvised acting aesthetic, comic flair, and off-the-cuff shooting style more reminiscent of Mike Leigh than of anything in current Japanese cinema. Asami is a professional shogi player who's been on a losing streak since marrying Kazuya, a mousy but devoted salaryman. Her strong-willed sister Rina, meanwhile, is encountering problems of another kind in her relationship with long-haired, chronically unemployed boyfriend Hiroki. As the shogi tournament heats up, so do the mind-games at home, with each person planning emotional moves and counter-moves to maintain some form of equilibrium. Slyly underlining the connection between sexual dynamics and economic power, A Woman's Work is further strengthened by the extraordinary interplay, both comic and serious, of its cast (including cult director Shinya Tsukamoto [Tetsuo: Iron Man, Gemin] as Kazuya), and by an immediacy that feels more like eavesdropping on conversation than watching fiction. — Jason Sanders

Written by Otani. Photographed by Kazuhiro Suzuki. With Asako Seto, Shinya Tsukamoto, Mikako Ichikawa, Jun Murakami. (118 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Open Sesame Co., Ltd.)