Synopsis
Philippe Grandrieux pays tribute to Masao Adachi, a Japanese filmmaker with a turbulent past who is now reclusive in his native country. Back and forth between politics and cinema, between Trotskyism and surrealism, between Palestine, Lebanon and Japan, between yesterday and today, between beauty and resolution, between the art of eating and that of being a father, this is the hazardous and determined life of Masao Adachi.
A word from Tënk
From the fertile genre of the artist's portrait, filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux weaves an immersive network of perceptions and sensations interwoven into the heart of the autopsy of a decisive period in Japanese cinema.
Under Grandrieux's visceral gaze, Masao Adachi's tumultuous odyssey, from the university benches to the territories of insurrection, is reborn first of all through the serious, floating and out-of-this-world voice of the Japanese scriptwriter and filmmaker, whose every fragment of life transmits the unspeakable substance of rebellion, of sedition as an interpretation of reality and art.
Between the two artists, the intimate and free dialogue is first built around a subtle tension between sound and image, editing and duration. Absorbing the thought of the revolutionary filmmaker as an extension of his own interrogations, Grandrieux then erects, little by little, a common relationship to the cinema as an exercise of emancipation and an instrument of poetic and political struggle.
Terence Chotard
Filmmaker
