New generation of Japanese filmmakers highlighted at Toronto festival (fwd)

[moshi moshi]

As it's rare enough press agencies write about it, I figured some people
on the list might be interested...
olivier

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 19 Sep 1998 14:41:52 PDT
From: AFP <C-afp at clari.net>
Newsgroups: clari.living.movies, clari.world.asia.japan
Subject: New generation of Japanese filmmakers highlighted at Toronto festival

  	  				 
   TORONTO, Sept 18 (AFP) - A new generation of filmmakers,  
credited for reviving Japanese cinema, is being highlighted at this 
year's Toronto International Film Festival. 
   Crossing all genres from comedy and drama to action and  
thriller, young Japanese filmmakers showed about 20 movies 
representing the "new beat of Japan" which has broken with the 
ironic tendencies that marked films of the previous decade. 
   "They returned to a more conventional film making style," said  
Noah Cowan, an organizer of the festival's special program on 
Japanese film. 
   "But it is not only an attempt to recreate the style of the  
classical cinema. Each shows a freshness." 
   One of the leaders of the new school, Kiyoshi Kurosawa,  
presented "The Cure" about a clumsy but brutal police investigation 
into serial murders that serves as a metaphor for the identity 
crises that run through contemporary Japanese society. 
   Other directors, such as Saito with "Sunday Drive" and Sabu with  
"Unlucky Monkey," explore the alienation of the individual in urban 
life. 
   In one of the darkest films in the program, "Bullet Ballet,"  
Shinya Tsukamoto portrays the descent into hell of a Tokyo salaryman 
who becomes fascinated with violence after the death of his 
fiancee. 
   Violence is also omnipresent in the less sociological film  
"Sharkskin Man and Peach Hip Girl," a full-length movie about a 
cocktail party electrified by sex and drugs. 
   "Screening the film should almost be like reading a funny and  
violent manga," said director Katsuhito Ishii, referring to popular 
Japanese comic strips. 
   On the other extreme, certain films dive into poetic meditation,  
like  "Paradise Sea" from Koji Hagiuda, in which a student visiting 
a small fishing island helps an old artist build a traditional 
fishing boat. 
   To write "After Life," which presents age-old questions about  
the quest for meaning in life, director Hirokazu Kore-Eda asked 
people to tell him what memory they would chose if they could bring 
only one with them into the afterlife. 
   "There is a kind of obsessive interest for the past, a form of  
nostalgia which is striking in many films," Cowan said.