Videophobia
Daisuke Miyazaki, 2019, Japan, 89 min
Video Killed the Radio Star and Everyone Else
Ai (a superbly laconic Tomona Hirota) haunts the streets of Osaka dressed as a mascot. After going home with a stranger, she wakes up to find footage of their intimate encounter uploaded to a porn site. As all systems of recourse and remedy fail her and her sense of dislocation and alienation intensifies, Ai resorts to a strange solution.
Following the rap-inflected drama Yamato (California) and the globe-trotting Tourism, Daisuke Miyazaki unveils another potent subversion of the so-called monolith of Japanese culture. Videophobia unfolds as paranoid techno-thriller about identity, set on the backstreets of an industrial and multicultural Osaka captured here in beautiful, stark black-and-white. Concerns with obsessive image-making and issues of surveillance and consent in the digital age are embodied in the plight of a young woman from the city’s Koreatown; in an eerie film about the self – watching us as much as we watch it.
Daisuke Miyazaki, 2019, Japan, 89 min
Video Killed the Radio Star and Everyone Else
Ai (a superbly laconic Tomona Hirota) haunts the streets of Osaka dressed as a mascot. After going home with a stranger, she wakes up to find footage of their intimate encounter uploaded to a porn site. As all systems of recourse and remedy fail her and her sense of dislocation and alienation intensifies, Ai resorts to a strange solution.
Following the rap-inflected drama Yamato (California) and the globe-trotting Tourism, Daisuke Miyazaki unveils another potent subversion of the so-called monolith of Japanese culture. Videophobia unfolds as paranoid techno-thriller about identity, set on the backstreets of an industrial and multicultural Osaka captured here in beautiful, stark black-and-white. Concerns with obsessive image-making and issues of surveillance and consent in the digital age are embodied in the plight of a young woman from the city’s Koreatown; in an eerie film about the self – watching us as much as we watch it.
Daisuke Miyazaki, 2019, Japan, 89 min
Video Killed the Radio Star and Everyone Else
Ai (a superbly laconic Tomona Hirota) haunts the streets of Osaka dressed as a mascot. After going home with a stranger, she wakes up to find footage of their intimate encounter uploaded to a porn site. As all systems of recourse and remedy fail her and her sense of dislocation and alienation intensifies, Ai resorts to a strange solution.
Following the rap-inflected drama Yamato (California) and the globe-trotting Tourism, Daisuke Miyazaki unveils another potent subversion of the so-called monolith of Japanese culture. Videophobia unfolds as paranoid techno-thriller about identity, set on the backstreets of an industrial and multicultural Osaka captured here in beautiful, stark black-and-white. Concerns with obsessive image-making and issues of surveillance and consent in the digital age are embodied in the plight of a young woman from the city’s Koreatown; in an eerie film about the self – watching us as much as we watch it.