² Nippon Retro

JAPANESE FILM NOIR

As part of CROSSING BORDERS, the thematic focus of this year’s festival, NIPPON RETRO explores Japanese Film Noir. This variety of the genre is heavily influenced by American crime films of the 1940s and 1950s and – like Noir as a whole – is aesthetically marked by German Expressionist films of the 1920s. The stories deal with social outcasts, hardened anti-heroes, and shady gangsters. In Japan, the aesthetics and the pessimism of Noir films resonated with post-war society. The retrospective opens with Yasujiro OZU’s silent film DRAGNET GIRL with live piano accompaniment by film critic and musician Daniel KOTHENSCHULTE. After that, films by grand masters such as Akira KUROSAWA (THE BAD SLEEP WELL) and Seijun SUZUKI (TAKE AIM AT THE POLICE VAN, YOUTH OF THE BEAST) will guide you into the depths of the criminal underworld. However, the dirty deeds of a car company stopping at nothing to outdo the competition (THE BLACK TEST CAR) are no less ruthless than the methods of the yakuza.

In cooperation with Japan Foundation Tokyo and the Japanese Cultural Institute of Cologne, with the friendly support of Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain.