A new film by young Japanese documentarist Sayaka Ono (a disciple of the legendary Kazuo Hara), whose debut feature and self-documentary “The Duckling” made a sensation in Japanese doc world (screened at UPAF 2011). Love and Walbachia is a tapestry of lives and feelings of love of various sexual minorities – intersex, transgender, lesbian, and transvestite people in Japan, shot from a sensitive distance. While “speaking nearby” the others (borrowing Trinh T. Minh-ha’s words) and showing us the vagueness and confusingness of gender, love, dreams, happiness, and life struggles that differ from a person to person, the film also questions the meaning of being women in Japan. Walbachia in the title is a type of symbiotic bacteria which shifts the gender of its hosts. Produced by Yoshiko Hashimoto of Fake (dir: Tatsuya Mori) and Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA. Okayama Premiere.
Director, Camera, Edit: Sayaka ONO. 2017, 94min., digital video, color, Japan. Documentary. With English subtitle.
Trailer w/ English sub
Official site:
http://koi-wol.com
Screening Date/Time
Tokyo: Sun, July 29, 16:00~
Sayaka Ono: Director, Camerawoman, and Editor
Born in 1984. Film and TV director. In 2005, she made a feature-length self-documentary The Duckling as a thesis film for Japan Institute of the Moving Image with Kazuo Hara producing and overseeing the production, which explored her own relationship with her family tackling their dark sexual-abuse and religious past. She had to wait many years to get family members’ consents, and the film was opened in theatres in 2010. As a TV director, her work includes: Genpatsu Aidoru (literal translation: Nuclear power plant Idols, 2012, the 50th Galaxy Award Honorable Mention); Bokutachi Onnanoko (literal translation: We boys are girls, 2013), both for Fuji TV’s NONFIX. She also served as Camerawoman for a feature film Tonaru hito /Never Let Me Go (2012, dir. Kazuya Tachikawa). While working for TV production, she continues to create her own documentary films.