This event has been rescheduled to December 18th.

13 years after the passing of filmmaker Yukiyasu Shimada (1964-2011), Borgo Santa Brigida 5/a invites you to the first retrospec tive outside of Japan dedicated entirely to the director's personal films.

In Japan, Shimada is remembered in the context of underground, independent cinema and AVs mainly as a producer of indie films through his production and distribution company IMAGE RINGS. But he was also the creator, president and organizer first of the Gandhara Film Festival and then of the Immoral Film Festival, active in the promotion of independent cinema from 1995 until his premature death in August 2011.

The great film heritage left to us by Shimada Man, so nicknamed for the superhuman efforts and the inexhaustible dedication he put into making Japanese indie cinema known and distributed, is still to be discovered today and will be exclusively screened for one evening in Parma at our theatre on December 18th at 9:00 pm.

The works that the filmmaker shot in 8mm and video remain indeed unknown and rarely screened. Although Shimada began filming as a child using his father's camera and then as a teenager made a film with a professio nal Fujica given to him by his parents, it wasn't until the early nineties, while attending the Image Forum Institute in Tokyo, that he began working on a series of more structured films, almost always characterized by the presence of the filmmaker himself on the scene as a character or as a self commenting voiceover.

According to researcher Chisato Nasu, «during those years Shimada learned to use the camera as a means to open up to others. Many of his films are directly based on his personal and intimate experiences. […] For him, filming was like an expression of love. Universal, shared experiences and feelings, which is why Shimada's films continue to retain a sentimental, nostalgic and sometimes even narcissistic value ».

The central theme that connects the six titles selected for this memorial retrospective is therefore love, be it young, naive, uneasy, unrequited, then transformed into obsession, perversion or even immor(t)al passion. We will be dragged through all these stages thanks to the eye and word s of the “amateur cinematographer” Shimada, starting with the medium length film “The Fall of Walhalla” (1993) and ending with the short “KE/FA” (1999), which stars the director himself and the Shimada girl Ichigo chan. Also featured in the program is the video work “I Want to Rent Kyoto” (2007) and, at the end of the screening, an unfinished final farewell. We look forward to seeing you at Borgo Santa Brigida 5/a for this elegiac sentimental journey into the exhumed filmography of Yukiyasu Shimada, an ode to love, to life without rules and balance. All works are digital copies with English subtitles.

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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