Year: 2000
Duration: 116'
A man walks in a parking lot under a snowstorm. The but? instructor Maro Akaji directs the dress rehearsal of a performance. The fashion designer Arakawa Shin’ichir? prepares a new collection. The director Sion Sono begins a film about a schoolgirl who loves to run and falls in love with a restaurant chef with whom she has never talked. Their stories overlap and interweave, until we return to the parking lot, where another man appears, joins the first man and takes him away, while their footprints remain impressed in the snow. “The word ‘utsushimi’ isn’t used in modern Japanese, if not in poetry. The word was invented in the Edo period to indicate the body that is present in that precise moment. [...] ‘Utsushimi’ indicates something that is alive and beautiful (in Japanese, ‘beautiful’ is ‘utsukushii’) but also fluctuating and transitory, like the waves of the sea. This alive, beautiful and precarious thing is the body. To move the body, to view/portray the body, to cover the body are all artistic forms that permeate our lives, even we don’t often realize it.” (Franco Picollo)
Biography
film director
Sion Sono
Sion Sono (Toyokawa, Japan, 1961) is an internationally acclaimed Japanese filmmaker. His movies depict Japanese society in a provocative and violent way, amid a plethora of pop culture references. His most renown films include Suicide Club (2002), which is part of a trilogy on alienation along with Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005), winner of the Berliner Zeitung Jury Award, and Love Exposure (2008), winner of the FIPRESCI Award and the Caligari Film Award at the Berlinale. Love Exposure is also the first film of the “trilogy of hate,” which includes Cold Fish (2010) and Guilty of Romance (2011). He participated to the Venice Film Festival in 2011 with the feature Himizu, and in 2013 with Why Don’t You Play in Hell. The Torino Film Festival paid tribute to him with a retrospective in 2011. He participated in several TFF editions with his films Tokyo Tribe (2014), Love & Peace (2015), TAG (2015) and Shinjuku Swan (2015).
FILMOGRAFIA
The Room (1992), Suicide Club (2002), Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005), Strange Circus (2005), Hazard (2006), Exte: Hair Extensions (2007), Love Exposure (2008), Cold Fish (2010), Guilty of Romance (2011), Himizu (2011), Why Don’t You Play in Hell (2013), Tokyo Tribe (2014), Love & Peace (2015), Riaru onigokko (TAG, 2015), Shinjuku suwan (Shinjuku Swan, 2015), Antiporno (2016), Tokyo Vampire Hotel (serie tv/tv series, 2017).
Cast
& Credits
regia, soggetto, sceneggiatura/director, story, screenplay
Sion Sono
fotografia/cinematography
Kobayashi Yasuhiro, Sion Sono, Suzuki G?
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Arakawa Shin’ichir? (se stesso/Himself), Araki Nobuyoshi (se stesso/Himself), Maro Akaji (se stesso/Himself), Sion Sono (se stesso/Himself), Suzuki Takuji (l’uomo del ristorante/Man of Restaurant), Sawada Yukiko (la ragazza/Girl), Fueki Kazushi, Sugiyama Masahiro (i tassisti/Taxi Drivers)
produttori/producers
Fujimaru Toshiki, Nishikawa Hiroshi
produzione/production
Anchors Productions
vendita all’estero/world sales
Nippon Connection
