LA FAUTE DES FLEURS _ a portrait of Kazuki Tomokawa

It was in the middle of the summer 2008, i received a long email from a japanese ‘fan’. Looked like it was just some lovely words, advising me to film a japanese musician, a certain rare folk artist named Tomokawa something. It took me 4 more months to re-read the email until the end – and discover that this fan was actually inviting me to Japan to make a movie about his idol.

We went there for 2 weeks, in march 2009, and this filming experience was by far the most important of my life.

Kazuki Tomokawa, that’s his name, 59 year old man, at first the exact idea you could get of a cinema character straight from a yakuza movie, a guitar in his hand and a scream in his mouth. But then the camera allows you to explore more and makes you discover the multiple layers of his existence and belief in life, his past as an actor for Oshima or Miike, his passion for bike race gambling, his unstoppable addiction to alcohol, his amazing skills as a painter, and his troubled past with his son, you soon got the feeling there’s only one Tomokawa Kazuki. As there was only one Rimbaud.

The other day, while working on the edit of ‘La Faute des Fleurs’, a friend of mine was helping to translate certain sequences. At some point, she would suddenly burst into tears. At the question what happened, she turned to me and said, ’it’s the way he speaks… he is like a poem’.
Tomokawa, the screaming philosopher.

kazukitomokawa.com/

to be released in 2010

images by vincent moon
sounds by gaspar claus & teresa eggers
script by vincent moon & teresa eggers
edit by vincent moon & lucas archambault

winner CPH-DOX 2009 sound&vision award