Official Selection - Competition 2002 / Filament / Japan 2001
Tokujiro Sawada, the owner of a small photographic studio, lives in the imaginary town of Kouya. His wife left him ten years earlier for a younger man, and his two adult children aren’t thrilled by the fact that their father is a transvestite. The son is mixed up with a street gang and the daughter, once married to a mobster, has her own problems. This family appears to be on the brink of collapse....
The film unfolds in the imaginary town of Kouya where Tokujiro Sawada, the owner of a small photographic studio, lives with his two adult children. His 25-year-old son Kyota, nicknamed Filament, is a member of a street gang and is going nowhere fast. Filament’s sister Asumi, two years his senior, was once married to a member of Yakuza, the Japanese mob. She suffers from sleepwalking, and not even their father is spared an eccentricity. Nights he dresses up as a woman and hits the streets under a new identity. Ten years previously the mother of this odd family ran off with a younger man. But now she has returned, just at the moment when the family is heading for disaster. The son doesn’t want to forgive her, although he himself is going through rough times, and the daughter’s ex begins to threaten her. The father, till now only wanly looking on, must make a decision....
108 min / Black & white, 35 mm
Director Jinsei Tsuji
/ Screenplay Jinsei Tsuji
/ Dir. of Photography Takahiro Tsutai
/ Music Jinsei Tsuji
/ Editor Shuichi Kakesu
/ Producer Shin Yoneyama, Akira Yamamoto
/ Production Matsushita Agency Corporation
/ Cast Takao Osawa, Haruka Igawa, Yasumasa Morimura, Yun Murakami
The director (b. 1959) uses the name Jinsei Tsuji mainly when engaged as a writer, poet and singer, but he also takes the name Hitonari Tsuji when composing, photographing and directing. His novels Pianissimo, Hahanaru nagi to chichinaru shike, Anti-noise, Kaikyou no hikari and Hakubutsu have won numerous Japanese literary awards. His film Sennen-Tabito (1999) won the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice IFF and Hotoke (2000) was presented at the Berlinale and at the Asian Film Festival of Deauville.
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