Quote:
Takahisa Zeze first assisted on three productions tailored to gay audiences by the Pink studios Shishi Productions and ENK Productions before releasing his first own feature-length film in 1989. Even this debut made it clear that the director, who had been socialized with politically engaged protest cinema, was set to exploit the artistic scope of the production context in a special way: Into the erotic film frame, Zeze carries the tragic love story between a member of the Korean minority and a Taiwanese prostitute, and turns in a previously unprecedentedly offensive way to the exclusion experienced by impoverished Asian migrant milieus in Japan – a theme that was to preoccupy the filmmaker again and again throughout his career. The setting is a pile-dwelling settlement near Tokyo-Haneda Airport that belongs neither entirely to land nor to water, an allegorically charged no-man’s-land backdrop also found in numerous of Zeze’s films to come. –Christian LenzRead More »
