A report from the meeting with Tsubota Yoshifumi, the director of MIYOKO
The meeting was held in ‘I Love Cinema’ Café just after the screening of his film. It was the director’s first visit to Poland, but being familiar with Polański’s works, he doesn’t perceive Poland as a completely foreign country. ‘MIYOKO’ was enthusiastically recognized by the audience not only because of its script but also because of the envelope around film adaptations of manga and the Japanese film industry.
Daring sex scenes with the participation of Marî Machida, the actress who was awarded at the festival in Japan, could turn our attention away from the main subject of this film- the way Shinichi Abe, the author of the manga which is the basis of the film, perceived his wife. “An artist isn’t able to flee from his emotions, which then lead into a depression”, Tsubota explained. The origin of the project is very interesting. When he was at the university, he became interested in Jonas Mekas’s films. Slow rhythm, essayistic structure and authentic and profound examination of people’s intimate world- we see it all in ‘Miyoko’.
On the other hand the film was supposed to be a clash of ‘pinku-eiga’ (a Japanese soft-core phornography) with the plastic sensitivity of Akiro Kurosawa’s works. It was Shinichi Abe’s personal recommendation, as he had the charge over the project. The original comic book written in the 1970s isn’t a commercial manga which has a circulation of few thousand copies, and such mangas are produced first. The director’s father, who was an erotic comic illustrator, had a great influence on him. Heedless of the subject matter, Tsubota was fascinated with the precision and professionalism with which his father created his drawings, spending entire nights at his home studio preparing them.
Right now Tsubota is working on two new projects. The first one is a crime film based on true events that were reported in newspapers. The second one is a story about a blind man who collects and sells seashells. Being inspired by authors of both animated and film worlds (e.g. by David Lynch or Seijun Suzuki), he created his own style. To provoke in order to acquaint the viewer with art is also Koji Wakamatsu’s motto. Wakamatsu is a pinku eiga director that was awarded for the film ‘Caterpillar’ at the Berlinare this year. Tsubota has achieved a similar success with ‘Miyoko’.