Saturday, November 21 07 PM
Japan Society
333 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017
Two adolescent classmates, the girl Kazumi and the boy Kazuo, tumble down some stairs and find they’ve switched bodies. This results in pubescent comic confusion and serious pronoun trouble, but Obayashi colors the gender confusion with a tinge of autobiographical nostalgia, not only filming in his hometown of Onomichi, but also framing the story through B&W 8mm film. When a character can say “I are you,” then perhaps saying goodbye to another becomes a farewell to oneself, framed by the lens of an old home movie camera. The film was so crucial to his filmography that Obayashi remade it in 2007.
For more information and tickets at: http://www.japansociety.org/