RAVENS

A Legendary Photographer Gets an Electrifying Tribute

Venue(s): Toho Cinemas Hibiya (Chante), Shinjuku Musashino-kan, Eurospace
From April 4 (Fri), 2025, Date and time, please check on the theater sites.
Language: Japanese/English with English/English subtitles
Official website: www.ravens-movie.com/
Theater website: hlo.tohotheater.jp/net/schedule/081/TNPI2000J01.do
Theater website: shinjuku.musashino-k.jp/information/
Theater website: eurospace.co.jp/works/detail.php?w_id=000848
Trailer: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x97t12y
Tariff: Please check on the theater site.
Advance tickets: Please check on the theater site.
Talk event: Please check on the theater site.

Title: レイブンズ (Reibunzu)
Director: Mark Gill (マーク・ギルズ)
Duration: 116 min

The world was reminded of Tadanobu Asano’s immense charm when he won a Golden Globe in March. In the new film Ravens, Mark Gill’s remarkable portrait of legendary photographer Masahisa Fukase, Asano reminds us also of his immense talents. In a story spanning 50 years, he embraces both the dark and the light, and with his luminous costar Kumi Takiuchi, brings the tortured artist and his obsessions to exhilarating life. Ravens is now screening in three arthouse theaters with English subtitles. Asano completists and fans of singular cinema should not miss it.

Acclaimed British director Gill discovered Fukase’s photographs in a magazine and soon determined to bring the Hokkaido native’s work to a wider audience. With the approval of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, backing from investors in France/Japan/Spain/Belgium, and a gifted, mostly Japanese cast and crew, created an achingly beautiful portrait “inspired by true events” that is more than worthy of the photographer’s own work (much of which is featured).

Asano invests the central role with his trademark manic energy and melancholy grandeur, earning our empathy for a man who is at odds with his success and plagued by contradictory impulses. When we first meet Fukase, he is a young man in the 1940s, trying to escape the emotional abuse of a tyrant father (Kanji Furutachi, terrifying), and to avoid his inevitable fate: taking over the family’s Hokkaido photography studio. He just manages to escape.

Later, in Tokyo, we see the moment Fukase’s fame is first sparked: when his wife gives birth to a stillborn child, the artist (now a commercial photographer played by Asano) first hugs it and then takes a photo. It will soon appear in a celebrated but controversial exhibition of his work that includes photos of pigs being led to slaughter. Sometime after that, Fukase meets and falls for the smart, beautiful Yoko Wanibe (Takiuchi). She becomes his muse, collaborator, wife and helpmate for the rest of his tragic life.

The film’s title is drawn from Fukase’s decade-long obsession with Japan’s karasu crows, immortalized in his 1985 monochrome photobook “The Solitude of Ravens,” heralded as his masterpiece. The obsession began after Yoko left Fukase, and Gill has taken it a step further in his film: the photographer’s hopes and fears are personified by a chain-smoking, man-size raven (José Louis Ferrer) who conducts conversations with Fukase from an early age, alternately encouraging and castigating him. The bird is a bold choice, but one that elevates Ravens to art.

Toho Cinemas Hibiya (Chante)

Shinjuku Musashinokan

Eurospace