FiumeNights

Intense times. Constantly surrounded by sounds and images, by shows and informations. Where such expressions as Tomokawa’s screams and moves ends up then?

This take away show, one of my favourites, was made around the time we (teresa eggers, gaspar claus, and i, supported by an incredible japanese team) spent with him in march this year. 2 weeks in Tokyo and Osaka, for a bigger project, a 80min documentary: ‘La Faute des Fleurs - a portrait of Kazuki Tomokawa’.

Here’s a story:

August 2008, an email from Japan, a certain Naohito Koike, who tells me about his favorite musician, Kazuki Tomokawa. And of his desire for me to film him.
The months pass, I come across that message again by chance, I realize that I had not finished to read it – in the last line, he notes specifically that he is organizing a concert of this Tomokawa in question in Osaka, in February 2009, and that he wishes to invite me to document the event. We are in December, two months before the show. My friend Gaspar told me some weeks beforehand of this same ‘musician’ that he had just discovered via an experimental blog.
Two months later, Tokyo, invited by the good grace of a single fan. Yes, a fan, an amateur, a guy who liked my work and that of Gaspar, and who wanted to initiate a meeting. A meeting which can change your perspective on cinema and production in the 21st century.

Between time, the idea of the film evolved, it presented itself from then on as a portrait in length, a hour and some, on a character on which the rare elements collected here or there on the net say more or less the same thing: “cult musician, unknown”, “screaming philosopher”, actor and gambler, drinker and painter, intense and poetic. A cinema-oriented person dreams of this man, who, like in the now-famous anecdote, refused to play the role of Captain Yonoi (eventually held by Ryuichi Sakamoto) in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence by Nagisa Oshima, for a strange story of northern accent.

Two weeks in Japan, in the company of Kazuki Tomokawa, change a life. It is not necessary to understand the language (though the language is very poetic in his mouth), but just to experience the man live his daily life – intense, generous, hilarious, a grand life. And radical in his approach to creation, like all the great Japanese musicans these days. This ease with which he comes back to the extreme is constantly doing battle in the body of Tomokawa-san.

This Take Away show, filmed the day after a great show in Osaka, only reveals one side of his personality. I kept the bulk of what I shot for a film that I’m finishing right now, and which will be presented at the CPH DOX festival this November. “La Faute des Fleurs - a portrait of Kazuki Tomokawa”, will recount the lives of the young man from Akita, who left for Tokyo at the end of the 1960s to sell poetry in the streets, under the joint influence of Chuya Nakahara, the Japanese Rimbaud, and of his younger brother Satoru, who killed himself in Osaka during the 1980s. From these proletarian beginnings to his constant combat to deliver more words, of concerts fueled by declarations of war and of worldy love. Between Tokyo and Osaka, a city both cursed and intriguing, that gave us a February evening one of the most beautiful moments of our life.

you can see the 3 parts in an extended version here.
I am finishing those days ‘La Faute des Fleurs’, a new movie, a portrait of this unique character, 80min. Soon somewhere. You can follow the next steps (and we will post soon some outtakes and live sequences from the movie) here:
http://kazukitomokawa.com/

Yalla, see you in Barcelona for InEdit next week, or the week after in Copenhagen for CPH DOX. Gooood times coming.