TOCHKA
Dir. Hiroyuki Matsumura, 2008
Japan. 93 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.
MONDAY, APRIL 1 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 16 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 21 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 26 – 10 PM
Co-programmed by Edward McCarry and Kohei Okita.
An abandoned World War II-era bunker in remote northern Japan: two strangers, a man and a woman, have an unexpected encounter, as if mysteriously drawn to the darkness within. From daylight to nightfall, the two speak of their memories. Through stories and dreams incanted aloud in the cold air, the past begins to overwhelm their present, just as it clings to the walls of the war ruin, finally culminating in a haunting act of violence. A film deeply rooted in place, materiality, and the weight of history, and at once rigorous in form and delicately tuned to the flux of the world—to the wind, the sea, the land, the changing light, the breath and gestures of its actors, the rawness of sound and image—TOCHKA is the latest and most legendary film in the small but luminous corpus of Hiroyuki Matsumura, a figure deeply revered among cineastes in Japan. Shot on a DV camera and sound-mixed with a combination of direct sound and field recordings, the film was produced entirely on location in desolate Nemuro, the director’s hometown in Hokkaido, where these war ruins continue to dot the landscape, standing ghostly sentinel against an American ground invasion. “One of the most important Japanese films of the century,” this will be the first ever screening of TOCHKA in North America.
After a decisive encounter with the work of Jean Renoir as a young graduate, Matsumura began his filmmaking career at the Film School of Tokyo in the late 1990s, studying under director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and others. In 1999, his debut film, FACTORY GIRL, was screened at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, where it won the International Critics Award. YESMAN/NOMAN/MORE YESMAN, a film adaptation of Brecht’s learning play He Who Says Yes, He Who Says No, was awarded the 2003 Kyoto International Student Film Festival’s runner-up prize. TOCHKA, which premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2008, remains his most recent completed work to date. A new film, currently in preparation, is highly anticipated.
To accompany our special screening, we are pleased to present an archival interview with Matsumura from 2011, newly translated by co-programmer Kohei Okita, in a special zine.