THE EMPTY FULLNESS
"The Empty Fullness" is a song along with a short film, exploring the theme of bulimia and of relation with food as a filler of a sense of emptiness. That is how something pleasant and vital can become a strong obsession, turning into something dangerous. Silversnake gets full of food and the food, in turn, slowly devours her. After all, you never meet with your own kind, but only with their shadows.
In this videoclip, Gianni Salamone, with the help of Katia Della Fonte, a performer with animal-like movements, takes us back to an almost primitive being with precisely primary needs: eating, smelling, touching, having sex, in a mix of contaminations that will free him from the constraints of a life that increasingly alienates us from reality. Synesthesia is somewhat a metaphor for these times.
SYNESTHESYA
BITTER BLOOD
"Bitter Blood" is a modern drama-thriller film that explores the depth of internal hatred within a family. This emotionally charged film delves into the themes of revenge and prejudice, painting a gripping portrait of their destructive power.
SINGULAR explores the experiences of single gay men during the pandemic in London. The film crosses between genres and art forms, combining elements of musical theatre, contemporary dance, sound art and documentary.
SINGULAR
A Better Man
A misguided and purposeless Asian American teenager receives a magical bracelet from a popular "alpha male" self-help guru he admires to help him break free from his pushover nature. However, Seth faces strained relationships and a disconnect from his true self with the reliance of the bracelet's powers. In this story, Seth must come to terms with embracing his own intuition in order to find genuine self-acceptance and purpose.
Two men of different ages, talk about their lives and what haunts them. One, almost middle-aged, feels he has lost his way. Full of anxiety and metaphysical agony, he desperately seeks to find the path of return that will lead him to his paternal home and the years of innocence. At the point where he started his impasse, so far, wandering. The route looks like a strange dream. People, animals, machines, change form, properties, and actions in a nightmarish cluster full of paradoxical images, charged with passions and unacknowledged guilt. The other, an elderly man, is nearing the end of his journey. Locked up in a small room, isolated, accompanied by memories and ghosts from the past, he has stopped being anxious. He watches the outside world through the window, with the same stoic calm that he also watches what happens in the strange circus that performs in his small room. Everything that his imagination, memory, and sensitive psyche puts in front of him. With laconic sentences that are more reminiscent of oracles, he raises questions about an absurd and perhaps futile world. An almost nightmarish world, the world that spent its life vulnerable to the alterations of time. They are both the same person. The poet M. Sachtouris in different phases of his life. The questions he asks are not philosophical declarations or logical findings, but images. Images that seem to come from a dream and end up in his poetic iconography. At the end of the imaginary journey, the poet "finds", among the ruins, his mother, and the room he recognizes as the home of his childhood. He returns to the womb without finding an answer to what tortured him along the way, since "there is no sanguine answer" because everything "is a vast void rather like a tomb".
I LOST THE WAY
Enduring Spirit
Best Cinematography Winner
Senior
Best Feature Film Winner
Japanese version of Magma is more beautiful than sunset
Best Script Winner
Deliver Us
Best Horror Winner
Opening Date: February 8, 2023
Regular Deadline: March 10, 2023
Late Deadline: March 31, 2023
Online Event Date: April 4, 2023
‘They compare me to Ozu’
“My mother loved films! She adored Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, Vivien Leigh. We couldn’t afford to go together to the cinema, but she was always watching their movies on TV. She stopped all family business or discussions to watch these movies. We would watch together. So I adored film – like her.”
Hirokazu Kore-eda
Film Studies
The COVID-19 pandemic has shattered lives but, at the same time, it has made us get closer to one another and find solidarity in life. Nothing reflects this solidarity, this acceptance of diversity, this co-existence of various beliefs and opinions, more than the world of cinema, media and, visual arts.
Films, scripts, tv shows and music videos all play their parts in making our current life more bearable and they can show us how to be human beings, how to cherish each and every moment and opportunity in life and how to love one another.
Here at the Japan International Film Festival, we celebrate and highlight various experiments and experiences in the worlds of cinema, media, and visual arts, and we are trying to provide a platform for artists of all backgrounds to come together and share their narratives. We sincerely hope that by gathering the greatest talents in independent cinema/media, we can provide our audience (and fans) a chance to have a sublime experience.
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