All posts tagged: Producer

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Andrew Kirkham: Journey to the East

Published by Ben Dimagmaliw

If life is a journey, then the road which has led Andrew Kirkham from his native United Kingdom to Japan has certainly been an interesting path indeed. Though it is often said the destination is less important than the journey itself, for Andrew his physical and professional journey has literally brought him both to Japanese cinema and the sleepy seaside town of Zushi where he has settled. Along the way he has had to reinvent himself as the industry has evolved over his 39 year career, but he has also met and befriended many people who shared in his journey, some short-term, others life long. And the polestar which has guided him continues to be cinema. “My infatuation with all things world cinema funnily enough grew out of my love of music. I was not a Beatles type person and was always looking for the next interesting musical sound. So began my eclectic tastes in life.” And thanks to the BBC’s late night programming he was exposed early to world cinema through which he first …

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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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All In Due Time – Furuta Wataru

Published by Ben Dimagmaliw

If taken just on face value, the career of Furuta Wataru might seem inapplicable to a magazine about independent film directors. After all, the Shizuoka Prefecture native studied economics and computer programming at a Canadian university and upon graduation landed a job as a programmer for a computer company before being transferred to manage sales, advertisement, and promotion there. Only upon joining a production company did he begin creating visuals as a computer graphic artist. However, look a little closer and you’ll discover Furuta is an award-winning director of short movies that have played at various festivals both at home and abroad. His unique vision and humor has often been praised including by the likes of director Izutsu Kazuyuki, the Japanese equivalent of Simon from ‘American Idol’, who had “no complaints” about Furuta’s short, Confession, saying it was “a masterpiece.” Even when not in the director’s chair, the works with which he’s been involved still garner attention. He produced the outrageous Burst the Earth short movie compilation which created quite a buzz following its broadcast …

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Art of Persistence – Supersaurus

Published by Ben Dimagmaliw

For many, movies are manufactured reality, a stylized representation of it even if based on factual events. True situations are the purview of documentaries. However, the filmmakers at Supersaurus, producer, Ochiai Atsuko (pictured), and director, Sakaguchi Katsumi, have pursued an unconventional authenticity in their storytelling which have not so much blurred the line between fiction and non-fiction, but warped their defining spheres. Established in 1999, Supersaurus–named after the giant sauropod in reference to their desire to plod on making movies until their extinction–has released only six movies in their 18 year history. Each dealing with human dilemmas, their filmography serve as both snapshots of people’s lives, and also mnemonics of the best and worst qualities of humanity. They accomplish this by employing a kind of home movie immediacy, no doubt a function of their small, independent budgets as well as Sakaguchi’s background as a director of over 100 television documentary news programs. His camerawork is intimate, yet never overly “cinematic.” The cast are usually relative unknowns or first time actors, but with intimate understanding of …