SFIAAFF preview: Tokyo Sonata
The San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival opens March 12. The program came out last week, and it's an amazing one. There are several screenings I'm really excited about, and I'm going to set the stage for them one by one. I'll go in chronological order.
Tokyo Sonata
Friday, March 13
6:45 p.m.
Sundance Kabuki
119 minutes
I tend to follow directors. One whose work I've enjoyed and who has built up quite a reputation is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Most of his works tend toward horror and the supernatural, but not in a typical J-horror way.
I've only seen one film by this Kurosawa (no relation to Akira). Bright Future screened at SFIAAFF in 2004. Here's what I wrote about it then:
"Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future shows what's extraordinary about Japanese film these days. There's a murderer, a killer jellyfish loose in Tokyo's waterways, and a white-shirted teenage gang like you've never seen, all against a backdrop of urban blight. But Kurosawa isn't interested in lamenting the ruin of society or even in us liking his movie, at least not in the obvious way you'd see in most American movies. Like Akihiko Shiota, director of 2001's Harmful Insect, Kurosawa seems to be creating all this from so far above, sometimes literally, that he can make his characters do anything. Yet Bright Future doesn't talk down to the audience or characters. To me, it's a perfect statement of a punk aesthetic. Kurosawa's bright future (and as he told SFIAAFF associate director Taro Goto, he doesn't mean the title to be ironic), lies in youth smashing the conformity and nostalgia of a stagnant society."
This year, there's a whole retrospective of Kurosawa's work. He'll be appearing at the two screenings of a new film, Tokyo Sonata. It's not a horror film but a drama about the dissolution of a Japanese salaryman's family. Our friend Taro, now in Japan working on movies, wrote the teaser for Tokyo Sonata in the festival guide. He said the film references Ozu and Naruse, which makes me even more interested in seeing it. For more about Tokyo Sonata and Kurosawa, see Michael Guillen's interview with the director on his blog, The Evening Class.
Tokyo Sonata
Friday, March 13
6:45 p.m.
Sundance Kabuki
119 minutes
I tend to follow directors. One whose work I've enjoyed and who has built up quite a reputation is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Most of his works tend toward horror and the supernatural, but not in a typical J-horror way.
I've only seen one film by this Kurosawa (no relation to Akira). Bright Future screened at SFIAAFF in 2004. Here's what I wrote about it then:
"Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future shows what's extraordinary about Japanese film these days. There's a murderer, a killer jellyfish loose in Tokyo's waterways, and a white-shirted teenage gang like you've never seen, all against a backdrop of urban blight. But Kurosawa isn't interested in lamenting the ruin of society or even in us liking his movie, at least not in the obvious way you'd see in most American movies. Like Akihiko Shiota, director of 2001's Harmful Insect, Kurosawa seems to be creating all this from so far above, sometimes literally, that he can make his characters do anything. Yet Bright Future doesn't talk down to the audience or characters. To me, it's a perfect statement of a punk aesthetic. Kurosawa's bright future (and as he told SFIAAFF associate director Taro Goto, he doesn't mean the title to be ironic), lies in youth smashing the conformity and nostalgia of a stagnant society."
This year, there's a whole retrospective of Kurosawa's work. He'll be appearing at the two screenings of a new film, Tokyo Sonata. It's not a horror film but a drama about the dissolution of a Japanese salaryman's family. Our friend Taro, now in Japan working on movies, wrote the teaser for Tokyo Sonata in the festival guide. He said the film references Ozu and Naruse, which makes me even more interested in seeing it. For more about Tokyo Sonata and Kurosawa, see Michael Guillen's interview with the director on his blog, The Evening Class.
Labels: kiyoshi kurosawa, sfiaaff 2009
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