MAIKO ENDO RETROSPECTIVE

An Unmissable Trio of Otherworldly Sound- and Landscapes

Venue(s): Theater Image Forum
Oct. 10 - Oct. 30, 2020, 21:00.
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Official website: www.kuichi-tech.com
Theater website: www.imageforum.co.jp/theatre/movies/3671/
Theater website: www.imageforum.co.jp/theatre/schedule/
Tariff: ￥1,200
Advance tickets: NA
Talk event: Oct. 10, 11 and 16 after the film

Title: TOKYO TELEPATH 2020 (TOKYO TELEPATH 2020)
Director: Maiko Endo (遠藤麻衣子)
Duration: 『TOKYO TELEPATH 2020』: 49min, 『KUICHISAN』: 76min, 『TECHNOLOGY』: 73min

Here, perfectly timed for our current surreal state of existence, is a retrospective of films by Maiko Endo that capture both the entropic mayhem and mesmerizing beauty of our world — and beyond. The triple-header combines work that has been separately (and doubly) shown previously in Tokyo, but never as a united package. If you’re looking for a visually and aurally unique experience, you will not want to miss this.

It’s not often that a trained violinist moves from composing music for films to actually directing them, but that’s precisely the trajectory taken by Endo. Finnish-born and raised in New York and Tokyo, Endo creates art films that are resolutely cross border, with international casts and crews, including the director, who sometimes shoots and edits herself.

After coproducing Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo (2009), the hit doc about Japan’s obsession with insects, she made her own quasi-documentary, Kuichisan (2011), with an assist from that film’s director and cinematographer. It premiered at CPH:DOX, where it was touted as “the discovery of the festival,” and won the Best World Documentary award at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival.

Shot in a mix of gorgeous 16mm black/white and color by seasoned DP Sean Price Williams, whom Endo first met at New York’s legendary Kim’s Video, Kuichisan is a fractured portrait of Koza, Okinawa, where a 10-year-old boy who looks like a monk seeks an outlet for his spirituality. As he wanders, we experience a stream-of-consciousness vision of the town’s past and present, American and Japanese, melded uncomfortably together, with an out-of-synch soundtrack adding further discordancy to the densely layered images.

Slant dubbed it a “brazenly oddball doc-fiction hybrid,” and went on to say the film “is built on bold contrasts, engendering much of its in-the-moment fascination through the tantalizing suggestions of such contrasts. Tradition versus modernity, silence versus language, urban versus rural: Endo evokes all of these dualities through a stream of sequences rather than relying on a plot to tie it all together.”

Endo’s 2016 Technology is a little more narrative, a little more fantastical, but resolutely experimental in its approach to sound and visuals. First workshopped at Berlinale Talents, it earned the support of fonds de dotation agnès b. Shot in India and Iceland, Technology follows the journey of She and Loverboy. She (India Menuez) is a child from the moon who has been kidnapped by Earth, where she now drifts about the land, attracting people with her alien appearance and her smell. On earth, people are searching for a sacred plant that is no longer sustained by the planet’s ecosystem. Loverboy (Tristan Reginato) is a dealer of the plant’s seeds, a very dangerous job, and She is compelled to join him…

Endo’s Tokyo Telepath 2020 begins in summer 2018, when the city has become a giant building site ahead of the (now-canceled) 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and a program called Fusion is gradually digitizing the entire metropolis, including its inhabitants, ahead of the “year of the awakening.” There’s a shadowy society behind all this, and they’ve apparently sent two teens on a secret mission to collect data.

As one young woman, YO8888, receives signals telepathically from somewhere in the great beyond, and the other young woman, Kyonchan, scours the city to find her younger brother, who’s wearing a straw hat, we get an eye- and earful of the titular town in this pseudo-scientific sci-fi tale.

As with her previous films, Endo deploys densely-layered voiceovers, constantly overlapping images and mind-scrambling sound design (by Nicolas Becker) to inventively other-worldly effect. Sean Price Williams, her regular DP, captures familiar Tokyo landmarks in images that are hypermodern, portraying a dystopia that is as frightening as it is colorfully immersive.

Theater Image Forum

Venue: Theater Image Forum
Oct. 10 - Oct. 30, 2020, 21:00.
within 4 screenings are KUICHISAN or TECHNOLOGY not TOKYO TELEPATH 2020
Official website: www.kuichi-tech.com
Theater website: www.imageforum.co.jp/theatre/movies/3671/
Tariff:  General: ￥1,200
Talk event: Oct. 10, 11 and 16 after the film