Tokyo-Ga
In 1983, Wim Wenders traveled to Tokyo on a pilgrimage. He was searching for the spirit of Yasujiro Ozu, the Japanese master who had passed away twenty years earlier. Amidst the sprawling metropolis, Wenders looked for traces of the “mythical Tokyo” found in Ozu classics like LATE SPRING and TOKYO STORY —films that, according to Wenders, told the same recurring story about the same people in the same city, capturing the very soul of Japan for decades.
However, the Tokyo Wenders encounters is a dizzying torrent of neon lights, cold technology, and impersonal imagery. In this cinematic diary, he contrasts Ozu’s harmony with the feverish pace of the 1980s. From the hypnotic pachinko parlors to the surreal precision of factories churning out plastic display food, Wenders observes a city changing so rapidly it seems to be losing its own memory.
As a result, TOKYO-GA is far more than a documentary about filmmaking; it is a melancholic portrait of a city in transition.
Showtimes
This film screening is inspired by the new non-fiction book 'Liever lui dan moe' by film programmer Johannes De Breuker. Through filmmakers such as Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater and Kogonada, he shows how we can reclaim our attention by embracing precisely what the digital world has taken from us: boredom. The book is available from our webshop.
