Japan Japan

Nineteen-year-old Imri, after dismissing himself from the army, moves from a peripheral city in Israel to central Tel Aviv. He lives with a flaky roommate and finds work at a specialty shop selling kitschy gadgets. He moves in with an eccentric flatmate and finds work in a shop selling kitschy gadgets. For him, and his friends, the only reason for living in this place is to earn enough money to go to Japan. In the meantime Imri learns Japanese, goes to the movies, has sex with men…During this period, one of his childhood friends pays him a visit. Financially supported by her parents, which isn’t the case with Imri, she is about to go and live in New York. The two of them spend time together, talking and providing moral support for one another. Shot on video, Japan Japan is a mid-length experimental film. Sometimes speeded up, sometimes frozen into still images, and interpolating extracts from Japanese porn videos with shots of New York, the manipulated images match the protagonist’s thought processes. Imri feels somewhat lost, and admits he has no idea what to do with his life. Accompanied by Japanese music, he walks the streets, the camera alternately closing in on him and then receding. He wanders around, repeats himself, and loses his job. Although a war is taking place a few kilometres away from his house, Imri feels himself much closer to Japan. As an Israeli filmmaker, Lior Shamroz is aware that his films are often perceived as a window onto an exotic place in the midst of a political conflict. In his film he humorously questions the place of exoticism and orientalism in cinema and in his own life. To what extent does the Israeli population need projects abroad to distance themselves from the country’s problematic realities? Japan Japan presents Israel’s political situation as a backdrop that accentuates the difficulties the protagonist experiences in escaping his solipsism. –Locarno Film Festival