Just got back in from my second Japan Cuts screening, Ten Years Japan—a significantly more somber and thematically dense affair than the cute cat movie. Executive produced by Hirokazu Kore-eda, this anthology film (part of an ongoing international collaborative project) tasks five up-and-coming directors with speculating on the possible state of their country one decade into the future. Predictably, it’s kind of a mixed bag in terms of both content and quality; some of the shorts are bitter, hard-hitting satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, while others are a bit more optimistic about the human condition. Tackling such diverse topics as war, poverty, euthanasia, digital surveillance, and nuclear annihilation and evoking such cinematic classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Ballad of Narayama, Stalker, and Kore-eda’s own After Life, it at least offers up plenty of variety; unfortunately, the execution never quite lives up to the promising premise. It has, however, gotten me interested in checking out the other entries in the series…
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