For the first four seasons of the MIRRORLIAR FILMS Shorts, a variety of creative people – directors, actors, … and so on – were asked or tasked to craft a shot film around the theme ‘change/transformation’ [変化].
This theme, however, was not only chosen to give those who accepted the invitation some kind of direction – change is a vague theme as it is everywhere and always present, we are motor of it, the subject of it or something in between, but also to underline the aim of MIRRORLIAR FILMS: to transform who gets to make films and try to inaugurate an era where anyone can make a movie.
Before we delve into our three recommendations, we want shortly highlight the shorts that we did not include in our recommendations. If one finds in these short descriptions something that piques one’s interest, then do not hesitate to give that short a watch – there is something interesting in all the shorts.
Takayuki Yamada’s The Man For or Sara-chan’s Holiday utilizes a fantastical premise – a man called Matsuno (Kazuaki Kiriya) giving birth to a healthy daughter – to explore the different position subjects enter an interaction, the divergent effects the act of meeting sorts, and the repetition a subject can be imprisoned by. Endangered Species by Hirotaka Nozaki utilizes the signifier change to imagine a world where zombies and vampires (and their specific needs) are part and parcel of the mundane societal fabric and being mere human has become a precious good. Toshio Lee’s Mom In The Mirror does not only explore the Other’s dismissive and accusatory attitude towards divorce and the social hurdles single mothers face, but also touchingly develops the idea that change starts with the person in the mirror. INTELLIGENTSIA by Ken Shinozaki delves into the world of AI and the attempt to eliminate the risks that AI-sentience may pose for humanity. Tetsuji Muraoka’s Family Parting light-heartedly stages how actor Tetsuji with his family of creatives organizes a DIY funeral for his deceased grandmother at their home. For his short I Think I’ll Stay There, Takayuki Hayashi also utilizes the funerary element. With compositional simplicity, Hayashi traces out the way the passing of time impacts the subject’s position towards his own youthful dreams of the past – the field of nostalgia, regret, envy, and fantasy.
Our Recommendations
Good News (2022) by Daichi Watanabe
Daichi Watanabe grabs the spectator’s attention from the beginning by pulling him into the narrative via a radical colour-contrast. However, the pinkish shade of the glasses does not merely clash with the darkish reality of space that Miyuki (Natsuko) and Kotaro (Tetsuji Fujiwara) share, but also signals that their relationship has long lost its colourful frivolity – a kind of dejected togetherness remains.
Even when warmer colours inter the frame – i.e. the spaces outside their apartment, Watanabe ensures that a certain shadowy darkness clings to his two protagonists and the ambivalence that defines their relationship can be felt. For Miyuki, this ambivalence finds its expression in the signifier affair, a signifier she suddenly confronts Kotaro with, and the signifier lie, which she withholds from him.
Watanabe presents his take on the theme of change by returning to the initial colour-contrast, by contrasting Miyuki’s reddish-coloured budding hope of relational renewal against the unknown radicality of what awaits her. With his short, with his take on change, Watanabe proves that he is capable of delivering a pleasingly equivocal narrative and orchestrating a deeply ironic ending with a pitiful aftertaste.
Saune (2022) by Daigo Matsui
Daigo Matsui throws the spectator into the hot space of a sauna where a rather vague conversation between two friends (Yoshio Zenya/Tetsuya Okumura) is unfolding – “Which one do you think was the funniest? (…) which one was the best?”. By depriving the spectator from concrete referential elements, Matsui elegantly pulls the spectator into his narrative, tickling and playfully frustrating his itch to know.
Saune, in fact, serves as a testament of Diago Matsui’s talent at creating engaging and naturalistic conversational flows. With satisfying elegance, he structures his conversations around the fact that subjects never fully share the same field of signification, that a fundamental misrecognition defines the conversational interactions of subjects.
Within his short, Daigo Matsui plays with change at two different levels: the potential closing down of a sauna, which echoes the societal changes due to Japan’s aging population, and the desire of one of the friends to enact interpersonal change by confession his love. Yet, Matsui touchingly shows that societal change and subjective change runs at different speeds.
Our Own Bond, Anko! (2022) by Aya Igashi
Aya Igashi opens her narrative by letting the perspective of audience coincide with the shaky movement of the camera: we are the camera as well as the subject that is documenting a given reality, the reality of a family dealing with their deceased dog Anko. With this stylistic choice, she breathes a naturalism into the rippling ‘changes’ caused by a beloved pet’s passing.
The stylistic shift in Igashi’s short – from a subjective POV to a disembodied third-person perspective, does not merely highlight the passing of time, but also allows her to approach the theme of change from a somewhat different perspective. Igashi, in fact, utilizes this shift to explore how a subject’s absence renders her blind to changes – changes at the level of the subject and at the level of familial dynamics – and to emphasize, in a light-hearted manner, that certain relationships, notwithstanding certain shifts, are stabilized by an unchangeable ‘emotional’ kernel.