The Desert Archipelago

The Desert Archipelago was my first independently directed and produced film. The film won the Grand Prix at the Nyon Internationa Film Festival and garnered considerable attention both overseas and in Japan. The film follows the extremely simple story of an ugly boy who is manipulated by nuns as he matures into a man, but woven into that narrative are my own experiences and the history of postwar Japan as well as numerous fantasies. The result is a multifaceted and multilayered objet, the birth of a newly sur-realistic film-making. On August 15th, the day the war ended, I was in the third year of primary school. That day, when the reality that I had known turned completely upside down, I was saddled with the trauma of no longer being able to believe in anything. Searching here and there for some kind of spiritual salvation, I finally found the existentialism of Albert Camus. From there, I was able to build up my own kind of existentialism and this film is best understood as based in that “Kanai Katsu Existentialism.” The film was praised by European film scholars Max Tessier and Tony Rayns and was screened as part of “Eiga: 25 Years of Japanese Film,” a special program at the 1984 Edinburgh International Film Festival. –Katsu Kanai