Directing
24-year-old Nozomi quit her job at an ad agency and now works part-time at a convenience store. Her ordinary days are enlivened by funny and kind co-workers but her heart is troubled because she cannot tell her parents about her situation and she is haunted by her failure to meet the excessive demands at her previous workplace. One day, her former junior high school classmate Kanako appears and Nozomi begins to articulate how she feels.
In his mid-thirties, YANAGIDA Yoshinori aspires to be a movie actor but suffers from want of opportunity, working mostly as a stand-in for other professional actors in TV commercials. After a chat over drinks with a successful colleague, he decides to address his mid-career crisis by auditioning for a role in a student movie. Will he survive the student director’s endless script revisions and eccentricities, and persevere in this perilous path towards movie stardom? This tragicomedy of an actor’s life with a metafictional ending celebrates every filmmaker’s relentless dedication to cinema.
Two guys go ghost hunting in a basement, two salesmen get spooked by doppelgangers, a couple have a comedic night at a love hotel, and a counsellor interviews a criminal claiming to be a divine being. These are just some of the five-minute scenes that have been shot in one take by a single static camera and with no ADR permitted. As these everyday situations spiral out of control with plot twists, it’s a high-wire act for the performers to get to the punchline!
