SCFZ

As sad as it is not to go to the actual festival it's nice in some ways that it's available online in the US - https://japancuts.japansociety.org/

Usually one of my favorite NY festivals of the year, they always have a lot of interesting debut films and relatively experimental work, and many of the films take years to show up online with subs if they ever do at all. Will be trying to watch at least a few things this week. And it's interesting that the online format has made it easier for them to program some very long films like Kazuo Hara's 4 hour + doc reiwa uprising, which would otherwise be hard to fit in.

saw the 2 films by toshiayaki toyoda, someone whose early films (pornostar, unchain, blue spring, 9 souls) i like a lot but whose subsequent career i totally lost track of.

the day of destruction, which is playing for just one day (pointedly on what was supposed to have been the opening of the tokyo summer olympics) is the feature, short at just 50 minutes, and very odd - a monster of some sort is buried in a mine shaft, an epidemic spreads through japan, a shugendu priest attempts to exorcise and perhaps becomes possessed himself, the film combines coronavirus imagery and somewhat vague, if forceful anti-olympics politics. it's all very slow and controlled on the one hand, particularly in the layered (and aggressive) sound design, and fragmentary and tossed off on the other. not sure what to make of it but i found the directness and force, however ungainly, very interesting.

the short film, wolf's calling, is a much slighter. it is i guess in part some kind of allegory of the directors own experience getting briefly arrested for owning an heirloom pistol - a young woman finds an old revolver in a musty attic, has a kind of vision or fantasy of a group of samurai (including tadanobu asano) amassing around a golden wolf temple for some kind of battle. the vision ends abruptly before any happens (so to speak) and she looks at the gun out on her lawn. and there is strange after credits sequence of samurai on the roof of a skyscraper that appears in the feature day of destruction, overlooking the olympics stadium.

as a pair they have an interesting resonance, as a short think wolf's calling isn't much of anything, almost like a calling card film by young production company or something...

didn't even know he had one new movie out, let alone two! still waiting eagerly for subtitles for that shottan one.

and you might like the blood of rebirth, if that counts as his later stuff. man. time is flying!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoqptivRx_0

on-gaku: our sound, very brief, very deadpan funny independent animated whatsit about a trio of high school delinquents who decide to start a band on a kind of a whim. reminds me of those early yamashita films (hazy life, ramblers, nobody's ark), just the sense of wasted time and suburban space, but here the feeling of creating something out of nothing and its potential (but not guaranteed) transformative power is something else entirely.

the kind of film that is easy to underrate or overrate maybe. think it will sort of stick with me though.

was impressed with nobuhiro suwa's voices in the wind, his first film shot in japan in almost 2 decades. young woman hitchhikes across japan on her way to her hometown for the first time since she lost her home and family in the 2011 tsunami. a quiet, rambling road trip movie that breaks down into these small, melancholy encounters along the way. it's deceptively simple, very direct in its approach. as per suwa's usual strategy the script is mostly improvised, and a mix of professional actors and non-actors playing variations of their own story. a certain kind of backroads, suburban and rural and eventually demolished or barely rebuilt landscape is as much the focus as any kind of drama.