透視：更遠的日本・更近的南韓

Constructed as an epitaph to the novelist Kenji NAKAGAMI, who died in 1992 at the untimely age of 46, this film is sure to provoke an emotional reaction. Shinji AOYAMA pursues his subject-matter with a insatiable appetite, indulging in the writer’s fascination for memory and travel. The filmmaker sojourns in the haunts of Kenji NAKAGAMI’s childhood in the deep south of Japan. He looks for the ‘roji’, the ‘alley’, where the writer spent his formative years. In AOYAMA’s film, the director draws a sharp contrast between the past and the present.

“Tibet Tibet” is a nonfiction road movie in which the filmmaker travels to the Tibet mainland from India through China. He filmed the real Tibet from a traveler’s viewpoint. In 1999, a year later, he returned to India across the Himalayas and interviewed Tibetan refugees who has just ended exile from China.

The resident card system in Korea is the result of the unique situation of the Korean peninsula: the division of South and North Korea. It is the ultimate in “Big Brother” states. However, the South Korean Government argues that such a system is necessary because of the divided nation. This has persuaded people to accept this system without question. In this work, the filmmaker raises the problems of the system, which internalizes both Fascism and represses individuality.

Using film footage and composition notes left by Shinsuke OGAWA. Chinese director PENG shot additional film and completed the work, which depicts the manufacturing process of the Kaminoyama red persimmon. It also features fascinating portraits of the people who invent and make tools necessary for persimmon culture, and the spiel of the old women who run the persimmon trade. It illustrates the world of this small but strangely charming fruit.

Kim lives in L.A. In the summer of 2000, when she visited Korea, she filmed the daily life of her family on a DV camera. Since her family had never seen themselves on TV, she thought the video world make an exciting present for them. She would edit the video herself. But the editing process wasn’t easy. The following winter she returned to Korea again, this time with her unedited summer video. The work is a documentary of her winter visit to Korea.