Japanese Shorts Program

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
1997

The Leading Hand
Masahiro Muramatsu
JAPAN, 1996
30 minutes Colour/16mm

Bird Watching
Shinobu Yaguchi
JAPAN, 1996
15 minutes Colour/16mm

Okke-ke Bibirobos
Takuji Suzuki
JAPAN, 1996
19 minutes Colour/16mm

Brain Holiday
Hineki Mito
JAPAN, 1996
21 minutes Colour/16mm

This collection of funny, charming short films combines familiar themes of recent young Japanese cinema, like romantic infatuation, wide-eyed existentialism and a strange, absurd sense of humour, into perfectly compact, elegant little packages. Most of them have been shepherded through production by the Pia Organization, at first a small festival for experimental Super-8 work, now a major showcase for rising independent filmmakers. For the last few years, Pia has been producing one feature film a year from its past prize-winners including celebrated films such as Shinobu Yaguchi’s Down the Drain and Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s A Touch of Fever. This program gives a taste of what we might expect from the youngest generation of this increasingly re-invigorated national cinema.

The Leading Hand is a quiet mood piece in which a young man and woman are delivering a bookshelf and get lost. The young man, Sakai, insists that an invisible hand in the middle of the road will help them find their way. The woman is incredulous. A diffuse, grainy camera adds to the eerie tone.

Returning to his oddball youth vernacular of Down the Drain, Shinobu Yaguchi tells the tale of a young woman who steals a video camera from a trusting bird watcher. She shows it to her girlfriends and then goes to the bathroom. Her “friends” then trash her, while the camera runs.

Shinobu’s creative collaborator, Takuji Suzuki, also delves into girlspeak for his all-girl rock band tale, Okke-ke Bibirobos. A big black lump in the road makes two band members late for a band meeting. The subsequent audition reveals them to be a kind of grunge Shonen Knife.

In the very funny and beautifully photographed Brain Holiday, an accident triggers a man’s memories of his parents and girlfriend. Simultaneously morose and sarcastic, but with a bittersweet romantic edge, Brain Holiday is especially poignant. It is a characteristic example of a certain innocent nihilism found in Japanese cinema’s newest wave.
—Noah Cowan