Kohei Ando

A university professor decides to go for a tour in Akihabara, guided by a young woman dressed up like a French maid. As they both walk through the streets of modern Tokyo, the man and the young woman gradually speak of a past they both share, and ultimately a painful love triangle that continues to haunt them. A poetic rumination in love, memories and loss told almost entirely with split screens.

He pulls out a pair of scissors that tends toward the sky. So begins his journey through time, space and memory. Seasons change, years pass. Wrapped in a mysterious box of sunset, the boy grows older, becomes adolescent, young man, adult, old, but - strangely - the memories are beginning to lead their own lives. "What memory, what reverie, what is real and what is imaginary? I do not know ... "

A gay poem, clearly inspired by Cocteau, about the ambiguous relationship between a man and his two adopted sons. A meditation on sublimation, repetition, and death. The characters' images and movements are faint, but the mood is sensual.

A young woman returns to her birthplace for an ex-classmate's funeral. She and a friend lose themselves in melancholy.

Unhappy farm worker Mei borrows some money from her boyfriend Seng, boards a ship to Japan and leaves him broken-hearted. But when she is deported, it is Seng that greets her at the harbour for a night of bitter reflection.

Memory and reincarnation. The catalog and the anthology is an essential aspect of the art of Ando. His memories are assembled an oblique self-portrait. Ando explores his room and admits that he loves the goods correspond to an image of himself. He suggests that the objects once owned turn. They are associated with memories, and can be juxtaposed.

Writes Ando, "Oh! My Mother was the first work I made using a newly bought 16mm camera I had purchased with the writer Shuji Terayama in Paris. This piece was selected for the Oberhausen International Film Festival. In 1969, there were, of course, no video cameras like ones we see now, and color TVs were only found at broadcast television studios. I had just been employed at the TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System), and I often snuck into the studios after hours to experiment with the equipment. Oh! My Mother was made using the feedback effect, which is produced by infinitely expanding the image by looping the video."

Time. In HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes a long process a year it takes to cross a railway station. The film consists of an image of a train crossing a bush in the garden Ando. The film was shot from the same angle fixed for six months, through the seasons.

Japanese stars screaming: War!

The illusion of the present-day with the time signal. Prix d'or 1971, APA Film Festival, Tokyo.

Daryn, a seventeen-year-old girl, fed up with her life in a greenhouse, ran into a human smuggler and learnt the way to escape the town. She had not known at the time that this plan would change her life and those around her in the worst way possible.

A documentary film on the art of French painter, printmaker, caricaturist, illustrator, and draftsman Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 - 1901). The film features ample footage of specific locations that Toulouse-Lautrec visited and later pictorialized along with an expansive selection of his works that immortalized everyday life in La Belle Époque Paris.

Space. Inspired by photographs of Winston Link (Night Trick), this film is composed of images of trains passing by a house. Trains are seen from inside the house in a variety of viewing angles. The film lists all possible perspectives on the passing train and becomes a metaphor of cinema.

An elderly Japanese man witnesses the subjects from the paintings of Dutch Baroque artist Johannes Vermeer (1632 - 1675) come to life. Following their real-life manifestation, the paintings formulate a mysterious romance story set in late-Meiji Japan in which a young woman’s relatives die under unusual circumstances concurrent with the arrival of a monk and a suspicious maid.

A documentary film on the life of French Post-Impressionist Henri Rousseau (1844 - 1910) as told through animated recreations of his signature primitivist paintings, high-definition artwork reproductions, dramatic interpretations, and focused shots of key locations from the artist’s life and career.

An experimental film in which a young man chases the shadow of love in a dream-like world of childhood memories.

Futaro, now 14 years old, is an only boy. His mother, an actress, raised him on her own. She herself is innocent, just like a child. It seems almost incredible to Futaro that she was brought him up by her self. One day, in the garden, Futaro seems a man dressed like a samurai. He must be one of mother’s actor friends, Futaro thinks, but then he resembles Futaro’s father. The stranger is called Kusanojo. He was a true samurai and now he is a true ghost. Strangely, Kusanojo seems to have forgotten the fact that he is a ghost. A strange life of 3 people with Futaro, his mother and his father who is a ghost starts.

A cinematic rendition of Shuji Terayama’s poem, Astronomy of Love. The sweeping mood of the poem is mirrored in the cosmic landscapes Ando weaves together: lush sunsets, moonlit oceans and twinkling nocturnal cities.

A cinematic rendition of Shuji Terayama’s poem, The Summer I Turned Four. Coastal images, thresholds, waves, expanses, are folded in to those of a statue of a young boy, who looks impassively onto the wide vista, frozen in time.

A conceptual film in which Ando has assembled plans, and duration of his friends as they are listed in the address book. This is a gallery of happy friends of the filmmaker.