Kiyoshi Kurosawa, one of the great Japanese directors of recent decades, stars in a cycle organized with the Japan Foundation.
Kurosawa began shooting films in 8 mm in the 80 during his sociology studies at the University of Rikkyo. During that decade he also directed small productions aimed at the video market and would work as an assistant to directors such as Shinji Sômai, who would surely influence one of the most recognizable resources of Kurosawa's cinema, the long shots sequence from a distanced point of view. A time of formation that probably also brought him the economy of media and the realistic tone of his cinema.
Kurosawa would reach maturity as a director at the end of the decade of the 90, when he starred in a productive explosion, with fifteen feature films between 1997 i 2002. At that time he directed the two horror film classics that brought him international fame, Cure i Pulse. They are films from the turn of the millennium that benefited from the global J-Horror boom, but what, actually, the director acknowledges not having created from the perspective of the rules of the genre to which they are associated, that they did not limit him and that he did not take into account when making a cinema that overflows all labels. He seems to arrive at terror by accident while trying to make a psychological portrait of the contemporary human being. This portrait is also contemporary at the end of the millennium, that permeates, with its warning of a change of era and the threat of the end of time, the films of this period.
These films that allowed us to discover the work of a different director are the ones we recover in our cycle. A period in his filmography that also anticipates the cinema that Kurosawa would create in the following decades, films in which it is surprising to recognize, twenty-five years later, themes and problems that are very close to us: incommunicado, the isolation and lack of empathy that paradoxically have enhanced the new technologies, ecological crises, the virality, not only pandemic, i, especially, loneliness increasingly present in contemporary societies. In his cinema there is another common and recognizable element, the violence that explodes after being lurking behind a facade of normality. Perhaps a reaction understood as revenge for the loneliness with which his characters abandon any responsibility that oppresses them. They are characters facing extreme conditions, to scenarios that, on many occasions, they are apocalyptic. Subjected to isolation and incommunicado, they are vulnerable to horror, at the same time as, by its moral ambiguity, creators of this.
In addition to these seven fundamental titles filmed between 1997 i 2002, poc accessible today, the series includes the last two Kurosawa films released in our country, the stylized period thriller La mujer del espía and Cloud, presented at the Venice and Sitges festivals.
16.01.26 FRIDAY / 20.15 h
18.01.26 SUNDAY / 18.00 h
License to Live
ニンゲン合格 / Ningen gōkaku
KIYOSHI KUROSAWA. The Japan. 1998. VOS SPANISH*. Color. 109′. 35 mm.
Int. Hidetoshi Nishijima, Kōji Yakusho, Shun Sugata, Kumiko Aso.
Després de deu anys en coma a causa d’un accident, un jove desperta de sobte en un món totalment distint al que coneixia. Des de la seua innocència, tracta de reconstruir els vincles familiars i la seua pròpia vida, però no és fàcil entendre que la seua existència ha canviat per sempre.
