All posts tagged: current events

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Insider Looking Out – Yamamoto Hyoe

Published by Ben Dimagmaliw

Becoming a filmmaker requires specific skills. An understanding of and practical experience with film production techniques is a matter of course, however a non-English speaking filmmaker will also need to become English proficient if they aspire to the world stage. Unfortunately, the language barrier is still a daunting and significant obstacle for a large majority of Japanese filmmakers in 2019. Yamamoto Hyoe perhaps innately sensed the importance of learning English when he left Japan to attend high school in Massachusetts before entering NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts to study film production. Back in the mid-to-late 90s, this made him somewhat of a trailblazer if not an oddity, but doing so would give Yamamoto early insight regarding how filmmaking, like language, possesses a cultural component which can not be fully understood until one fully immerses oneself in that culture. From the creative process to business fundamentals, major and independent film production alike in the U.S. does differ from Japan’s idiosyncratic film industry–sometimes significantly. This education and experience is brought to the fore in Yamamoto’s debut …

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Complicity

Published by Ben Dimagmaliw

Chen Liang has come from China’s Henan Province to work in Japan as a technical trainee, but runs away from his place of training and becomes an illegal resident. He lies to his mother back home that he is continuing his training all the while performing work-for-hire petty larceny. In an unexpected turn of events, he takes a call for a job meant for another and pretends to be that person. He starts his new life living and working at an elderly soba master’s soba restaurant in Yamagata with the fear that his identity could be exposed at any moment. The feature length debut by Chikaura Kei deals with a timely issue–that of foreign workers, immigrants, or refugees making a new home in another country. Complicity in particular deals with “technical trainees” in Japan, a program for allowing foreigners to receive “training” while working in specific fields. The program has been criticized (and exploited) as a poorly veiled form of cheap labor. Rather than focus on the abuses which begins the story, the independent China-Japan …

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The Hungry Lion

Published by Ben Dimagmaliw

The internet was once hailed as the “information super highway”; information would travel across vast distances at incredible speeds allowing people to have more access to more types of information than they ever had before. Today, however, the internet more closely resembles a battleground than a highway, with information becoming the barbs and arrows of the media and its consumers. It is becoming more difficult to differentiate fact from fiction. “Fake News” has probably come to be the defining phrase of 2017 and perhaps beyond. Director Ogata Takaomi was aware of the way the mass media was beginning to trade away its obligation to provide objective information for the sake of profitability and audience size long ago. His latest movie, The Hungry Lion throws into relief how the proliferation of convenient means to record and disseminate information across the vastness of the internet is not only turning us into prey, but potential predators as well thanks to a mass media that is packaging information for ready consumption by a hungry public. One morning, 18-year-old Hitomi’s …

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Through a Theater Darkly – Ogata Takaomi

Published by Ben Dimagmaliw

The role of media in society has changed significantly over the last several years. It’s becoming more difficult to tell if media influences the masses or if the masses influence the media. Ogata Takaomi was becoming aware of this blurring of lines between sensationalism and journalism almost a decade ago. An avid lover of cinema since childhood, the Fukuoka native speaks of movies with an eager grin and a mild manner which belie the movies he has made. At the age of 25, he left the startup-up he founded as a partner and traveled abroad extensively. It was then he began to see the only way of life and society he knew in an entirely different light. His filmography is a gallery of thought-provoking studies intended to shed light on the biases instilled by society and the media in all of us. Ogata’s filmmaking is likely best described by the old adage “walk a mile in another man’s moccasins”. Having once aspired to journalism, he is unwavering in his dedication to steer his stories away …

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Out of My Hand

Published by Ben Dimagmaliw

The death of the American dream is a typical trope a variety of movies have tackled, mostly to the somber tune of disappointment and sadness. However, trope or not, there are still a plethora of stories on the subject matter still remaining to be told. What will separate wheat from chaff is the angle a filmmaker chooses to approach it. Just as Kohki Hasei avoided “poverty porn,” in the case of Hokkaido born Fukunaga Takeshi, that angle was not a tale of bitter realities in an unfamiliar country, but the resilient and determined spirit of immigrants looking to better their lives in a new country. Considering the controversial issue immigration has become recently, one might think Out of My Hand to be extraordinarily timely were it not for the fact Fukunaga shot the movie, his debut feature, in 2013. Feeling “out of place” in Japan, Fukunaga moved to New York wanting to meet and learn about people from other countries. After studying film production at Brooklyn College, he worked as an editor for a documentary about Liberian …

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Stolen

Published by Ben Dimagmaliw

North Korea is on the minds of a lot of people these days with its leader and the U.S. President goading one another like impetuous children attempting to prove their manhood on a playground, except they are not playing with sand. North Korea’s ballistic missile program is certainly the latest threat from Pyongyang, but for Japan and South Korea–two countries literally currently caught in the middle–a much more human dilemma continues unresolved: the kidnapping of its citizens a few decades ago. The governments of the two countries had been engaged in negotiations to compel North Korea to either return its citizens or at least provide their current status and whereabouts. With the focus shifting to a military/defense affair, the plight of the kidnapped victims and their families have all been but brushed aside. In fact, the kidnapping issue has all but disappeared from public consciousness despite being seen as a top foreign affairs issue not so long ago. It is this human element to which the mid-length movie, Stolen, attempts to draw attention once again. Its …