For the third retrospective event by @borgosantabrigida5a on the cinema of Kenji Onishi, we are bringing back one of the filmmaker's most personal and unknown filmworks, the 8mm feature "Light of Darkness."

The screening will be held in Parma at Borgo Santa Brigida 5/a theatre at 9:00 pm.

Passing by like a cinema train...

In 1995, Onishi founded Cinema Train in Suginami, his own production and distribution company for contemporary Japanese underground, personal, and experimental cinema. This legendary name was linked not only to his films, but also to many of the retrospectives that animated the end-of-the-century underground scene of Tokyo, introducing the cinema of many of his contemporaries (and others) whose work would otherwise have remained completely obscured.Decades later, the programs personally curated by Onishi and the filmmakers he collaborated with have also influenced our selections, prompting us to rediscover many of the names shown for the first time in Italy at the Borgo Santa Brigida retrospectives, like for example Tamami Midorikawa and Kaoru Tachibana.

Now we bring to light one of Onishi's forgotten and lost works: "Light of Darkness."It is a diary of fragmented sketches shot on super8 sound film in Ise City in 1996.The film, among Onishi's most intimate and cryptic experiments, was subsequently screened only once at Shinjuku Fu- in December of the same year as the closing of a Cinema Train screening.

Onishi later released a series of videocassettes as part of the Cinema Train Video Collection; "Light of Darkness" was among the titles he chose to represent and, in retrospect, be a legacy of his endless body of work.Today, the original material no longer exists; it was torn apart and then reassembled in the nikki eiga "FIELD FEET" (2008), a film that brings together twenty years of memories edited in-camera and emulsions carved by fingers exploring in the dark.

It's been thirty years since "Light of Darkness," in its first original and, above all, complete cut, has been shown to the public.A copy of this "ghost film," as the author defined it, reemerges from the other side of the world and from the darkness, so we take this opportunity to invite you to this special screening of two lost filmworks by Kenji Onishi.All works are transfered VHS copies from the filmmaker's archive, digitalized thanks to Archivio RI-PRESE.

The ticket price is €7.

There is the possibility to book a place in advance via
Email info.santabrigida5a@gmail.com
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