THE CAT THAT LIVED A MILLION TIMES

For over thirty years now, one of the most popular illustrated children’s books in Japan tells the story of a cat which lived a million lives without ever falling in love, until one day it meets a white female cat. Readers are enchanted by this story of life and death, whose author, Yoko Sano, now has cancer. A voyage to the places where she lived and images of her best-known book show us the life of the author, from her childhood in Beijing, to the period she passed between Milan and Berlin, all the way to her present days in Tokyo.

“One of Yoko’s famous novels The Cat with a Million Lives was published in 1977 and I was born in this year. My mother used to read it for me. The story about death and life of the cat was very scaring to me. It clearly showed that every living thing will die. I visited various people to collect their life-after-death stories along with interviewing Yoko. Through talking with these people, I collected the life-after-death to shoot this film. This film is the process of the destruction and reproduction of a movie director through the picture novelist Yoko Sano and her readers.”

regia, fotografia/director, cinematography Tadasuke Kotani
montaggio/film editing Kiyoshi Tsujii
musica/music Cornelius
suono/sound Kazuo Osawa, Tsutsumi Kensuke
produttori/producers Kazuo Osawa, Shuuichi Kase, Shigeki Kinoshita produzione/production Nondelaico, Contrail, TOFUU
vendita all'estero/world sales Carte Bianche