Media Mix, Dec. 11, 2021

Posted on December 12, 2021 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about a proposed revision to existing immigration laws that would allow more foreign workers to stay in Japan indefinitely. If the revision passes, it would go into effect probably as early as the spring. At the moment, of course, non-resident foreigners in general are not being allowed into Japan, so there isn’t a whole lot of formal debate over the matter. As pointed out in the column, however, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence being presented in the media that such a revision could prove to be controversial if only because a similar revision was controversial in 2019. It’s going forward because the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has already formulated a policy to relax residency rules for foreign workers in order to alleviate some of the labor pressures on employers. What they haven’t done is relax entry procedures, per se, so foreign workers, specifically laborers and service workers, would still have to get into Japan mainly through the equally controversial technical trainee program or as students who are allowed to work a certain number of hours a week or month. Companies who recruit white collar specialists already have greater freedom to hire foreigners, but that isn’t where the need is right now, so it will be interesting to see if the government relaxes entry requirements for laborers and service workers as well. 

It may prove to be even more difficult since those who oppose any increase in the number of resident foreigners will make noise. When the last revision was implemented in 2019, Sakura TV, a web channel run by powerful right wing players in the media and government, including Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), protested loudly, but despite the fact that many LDP members also belong to Nippon Kaigi the revision went into effect. One conservative politician complained about the revision by falsely claiming that 85 percent of foreign workers who “ran away” from their employers did so in order to look for higher paying jobs. In actuality, they ran away because they couldn’t live on the money they were making, which is a very different thing. For this current revision, the pushback has mainly been on social media, which tried to pin the blame on Kishida, since some elements think Kishida is too “liberal” on certain issues, but the immigration policy that the revision advances was already designed by the LDP. It is, essentially, a cabinet decision. Some pundits have said that the reason the LDP boldly went ahead with the revision so soon after the last one is its victory in the recent lower house election. They are taking advantage of whatever momentum they have at the moment, and make no mistake: the impact of this kind of revision could be huge. One pundit compared it to the Status of Forces Agreement with the U.S. But as mentioned in the column, there will still be social barriers to foreign workers even if the structural ones are removed. Without coherent welfare policies that can help these workers adjust and assimilate, they might not want to stay in Japan indefinitely, and that may be what the conservatives are counting on. How it all plays out economically in the long run is anyone’s guess. 

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Review: Gunda

Posted on December 10, 2021 by philipbrasor

One of the surprising things about Russian director Victor Kossakovsky’s wordless black-and-white documentary about the lives of some farm animals, at least in retrospect, is that it was shot on three farms in three different countries. While watching the film in a state of varying degrees of unease I was constantly under the impression that Kossakovsky never left the same half-acre of field and barnyard. And in a sense this realization, after having read the production notes following my viewing, that in fact the world depicted was not an integrated place brought home to me how easily a filmmaker can make an emotional case by manipulating things a viewer might take for granted.

Perhaps it’s not a big deal, but Gunda has little in common with conventional nature documentaries. It treats its subjects as animals at the mercy of their own milieu without trying to help us understand how they feel, and yet we do feel for them. Most of the storyline, as it were, is about a sow raising her piglets. The movie starts just after she gives birth, and while the newborns are cute their juxtaposition to their larger parent makes for queasy viewing (it ain’t Babe, babe). It’s all slobbery wetness and sucking and sometimes interpig violence, which may be play, but under Kossakovsky’s lens you wonder. At one point, the sow tramples on the runt of the litter and the viewer isn’t completely sure if the piglet survives. But Kossakovsky doesn’t linger on the notion, and thus the story takes on a life of its own, continuing through the weaning weeks to adolescence before the inevitable takes place—this is a farm, after all—a process the director handles indirectly but with no loss of tragic implication. 

Occasionally, he leaves the pigs to look at some other livestock, namely a herd of cows and some wayward chickens. Since everything is shot from an animal-POV, meaning close to the ground, as well as up-close-and-personal, the film has a claustrophobic feeling that makes you want a wider view to allow for a more complete picture of the environment these animals occupy, but that might confound Kossakovsky’s purposes, which seem to be for us to identify with these animals without anthropomorphizing them. The distributor stresses that the executive producer is Joaquin Phoenix, a famous vegan and animal rights advocate, so, at least from a commercial aspect, the movie has a target audience, but I wonder if other vegans and animal rights advocates will come away from the film with the kind of meaning they expect going in. This is how barnyard animals really live, but we can’t help but put it all into a narrative box. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).

Gunda home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Sant & Usant Productions

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Review: Last Night in Soho

Posted on December 8, 2021 by philipbrasor

Because Edgar Wright made his reputation poking fun at big budget genre movies, there’s always a feeling in whatever he does that he’s taking the piss, and from the first frame of his latest, in which it’s difficult to distinguish the modern-day setting from the barrage of references to England’s Swinging Sixties, there’s an overriding sense of cross-purpose at play. As it turns out, these competing temporal modes are what the movie is all about, and not just in the way they’re incorporated into the story, but in the way they are drilled into the viewer’s consciousness. Our protagonist, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), is a budding fashion designer whose obsession with the 60s is all-encompassing, from her 45s collection to her fondness for vintage fabrics. The thing is, Wright doesn’t stop there. He has to cast Rita Tushingham, an actress whose identity is completely tied into the British youth films of the 60s (A Taste of Honey, The Knack), as Eloise’s grandmother, and whenever Eloise asks her what it was like in those days you can just hear Wright giggling in the background.

That he uses this dynamic in the service of a fantasy horror movie only shows how beholden Wright is to the same kind of high concept that guided his parodies, but the results are less satisfying since he doesn’t have as tight a grip as he needs to have on either the 60s milieu or the scary stuff. Eloise, a suburban girl, moves to London to attend a prestigious fashion school and immediately her throwback style prerogatives run up against the post-millennial sensibilities of her fellow classmates, who ridicule her “granny shit.” Feeling ostracized and threatened, she moves out of the dorm and into a private flat under the care of elderly Ms. Collins, played in her last role by Diana Rigg, who, as Mrs. Emma Peel in The Avengers, was even more identified with the 60s than Tushingham was. Though the old-fashioned decor and atmosphere of her new abode initially makes Eloise feel more at home, her nights quickly fill with visions of another young woman trying to make her name in London—but during the height of the 60s themselves. Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) is an aspiring singer who is trying to get noticed by the shady management of the legendary Cafe de Paris. 

The pastiche comes fast and furious from then on, but the comical payoff one usually expects from Wright never comes. In fact, his determination to make this a real creepfest seems disingenuous in contrast, and the various subplots involving a fellow fashion student (Michael Ajao) with a crush on Eloise and a mysterious old guy (Terence Stamp—the original “angry young man”!) who may or may not be involved in a murder that Eloise sees during her dreamtime as Sandie, only confound the general mood. Even as Eloise turns detective to find out who Sandie really is (and whether she really existed) and what powers are sending her back in time to relive the singer’s tragic, exploited existence, the movie never properly follows a path that makes sense as either a thriller or a farce (or, for that matter, as a comment on the kind of sexism that has survived into the 2020s). Most of the effort goes into recreating the Swinging Sixties without making it at all believable, which is OK since it’s being reimagined through the mind of a girl born after 2000, but it still feels half-assed. 

Opens Dec. 10 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Last Night in Soho home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Focus Features LLC

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Media Mix, Dec. 4, 2021

Posted on December 5, 2021 by philipbrasor
Ishin no Kai leader Ichiro Matsui

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about Ishin no Kai’s (the Japan Innovation Party) attempt to regulate the distribution to Diet members of funds that cover expenses for mail, correspondence, and transportation, familiarly called buntsuhi. At the time the column was written and edited it wasn’t clear what the proposed bill would look like, but the main idea would be to replace a lump monthly allowance of ¥1 million, which is paid regardless of how many days a lawmaker works in a month, with a daily allowance that only covers days worked. Also, receipts would have to accompany a report of how the money was spent, which is not required now. The media found the whole matter suspicious because in the past some members of Ishin, which is based in Osaka but wants to become one of the main national opposition parties, used the buntsuhi to line their own pockets by “donating” leftover funds to their political support groups, a practice that at least one expert says is illegal. This is the so-called “boomerang” effect the media talked about, namely that the party’s complaint about the wastefulness of how buntsuhi is administered came back to hit them after their own use of the money was scrutinized. To me, the practice didn’t indicate rank hypocrisy as much as it showed how the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. At the local level, Ishin’s reputation has been built on fiscal reform, and they pounced on the buntsuhi issue as an easy means of spreading their cost-cutting gospel nationwide. They just neglected to look in their own house first.

Last week, the party announced it was submitting its bill to revise the rules for buntsuhi, but on Friday, apparently, the revision hit a wall. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party also had its own revision in mind and apparently the two parties didn’t see eye-to-eye on how to proceed, so it’s stalled for the time being. It’s important to note that while Ishin is technically an opposition party, its conservative philosophy is closer to that of the LDP than it is to other opposition parties, and that the transfer of leftover buntsuhi funds to political support groups is not limited to some Ishin members. It’s obvious from media reports that some LDP members do it as well. It’s just that they didn’t talk previously about doing away with the system, so there was less of a boomerang effect. Having the two parties oversee a revision of the allowance allocation may strike some people as an example of the foxes appointing themselves the guardians of the henhouse, but, again, that’s too simplistic. They obviously think the system needs to be overhauled, and it does. But other opposition parties don’t seem to have a problem accounting for how they spend their buntsuhi. As mentioned in the column, the Japan Communist Party makes a point of posting on their home page how their members spend it and how much they return to the treasury. They are, in essence, already following the protocols that Ishin was going to propose in its revision. Why they and the LDP can’t come to an agreement about a revision deserves more attention. 

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Media Mix, Nov. 27, 2021

Posted on November 28, 2021 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the suicide of an Asahi Shimbun reporter and what it says about the state of journalism right now, especially with regards to daily newspapers. I, of course, write this column for a daily newspaper and have had to contend with the issues discussed in the piece on an ongoing basis, but since I’m a freelancer my particular difficulties are different from those of staff writers, whose problems with management has a direct effect on what news is reported and how it’s reported. Coincidentally, Shukan Bunshun, the only media I know of that covered the Asahi reporter’s death, last week ran another story about local news. Apparently, a fair portion of the English language writers who work for Kyodo, the biggest news service in Japan, have been quitting lately, thus putting the company in a severe situation since its reach beyond Japan depends greatly on translations of its Japanese content as well as original English language reporting. The people who are leaving, it seems, are young and foreign educated, and though the article doesn’t go into enough detail it sounds like a typical example of power harassment, meaning the reporters in question are being regularly scolded, but not necessarily for incompetence. It seems to have more to do with the stories they submit and how they cover them. I’m not sure if these reporters think they can easily find work owing to their bilingual skills, but, in any case, they obviously don’t believe it’s worth their while to work for people who don’t appreciate their value. How much of this friction is due to the usual age-oriented, hierarchical hazing you tend to find in Japanese organizations I can’t tell, but even if that is the case, young workers shouldn’t have to put up with it. 

Taking the wider view, if this is how news organizations treat new recruits it doesn’t bode well for an industry that’s already in trouble. In the past, Japanese media people were hired straight out of college and not necessarily because of their field of study or expertise. It usually had more to do with the school they attended and the whim of the recruiter. As with all corporate hiring in Japan, the idea was that the rookie would be trained on the job according to the company’s peculiar needs and internal culture, and that included reporters, who often didn’t have any journalistic training before they were brought on board, so for most there was no grounding in what we tend to call journalistic ethics. But now an increasing number of young university students are looking toward a career in journalism, and the unfortunate reporter for the Asahi Shimbun was described as just such an idealist. His particular problems arose when that idealism clashed with the practical economic needs of his editor, but it may have also had something to do with the notion that young college grads are no longer as malleable as the corporate patriarchy expects them to be.

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Review: Minamata Mandala

Posted on November 26, 2021 by philipbrasor

Kazuo Hara’s latest documentary is six hours and 12 minutes, thus making it almost twice as long as his last epic, Sennan Asbestos Disaster. The two documentaries are similar in subject matter and theme, but I would hardly call them redundant. Both address the grievances of people who have suffered medically for the neglect of the state and attempt to gain redress only to spend many years in an agonizing tug-of-war with the bureaucracy, which is invariably implacable. 

Minamata is, of course, synonymous with structural neglect. Lawsuits to gain some measure of relief for the tens of thousands of people injured by the methylmercury released by the Chisso Corporation in the middle of the 20th century in the seas off Kumamoto Prefecture have been going on for almost 60 years, and are still going on for some people. Minamata has been seared in the mind of the world through the photos of W. Eugene Smith, whose own biopic with Johnny Depp opened earlier this year. As with Sennan, Hara is not so much interested in the original crime, which is pretty cut-and-dry, but rather the process of wearing-down that those in power put in motion in order to make an inconvenient problem go away. And while it doesn’t go away, it may not reach the ears of the general public in a way that will make much difference. Hara’s job is to place the viewer right in the middle of the controversy, and while he doesn’t bother to ask for the other side’s view of the matter, you can tell from the action he does put on film that the other side doesn’t give two shits about what the public might think. To them, silence is golden, since it is the most absolute way of asserting power.

Hara breaks the film, which was was shot over a period of some 20 years, into three parts. The first establishes the science behind the plaintiffs’ claim, which find the government’s various remedies to be self-serving and insufficient. The criteria for providing compensation and medical treatment established in 1977 was based on findings that said Minamata Disease was all about damaged nerves, a decision that excluded many patients who, when tested, presented no nerve damage. Two doctors from Kumamoto, however, theorized quite early on that Minamata Disease was about losing brain function, or, more precisely, it was a disease of “sensory disturbance.” People’s sense of taste and smell were diminished, they lost peripheral vision and some feeling in their extremities, and had trouble communicating, but none of these symptoms presented as damaged nerves because the problem was in the brain and its ability to send the proper signals to the body. It wasn’t until a 2006 Supreme Court case brought by a group of Minamata victims living in the Kansai region that the sensory disturbance  explanation was taken seriously. 

The rest of the film presents how this inconvenient ruling was ignored by both the Environmental Ministry and Kumamoto Prefecture, which stalled in its duty to rectify its certification processes for Minamata victims. It’s a maddening journey, filled with court victories that prove to be empty, either because the authorities appeal them again, drawing out the agony for sick people who are at death’s door, or because they simply interpret the court ruling in a way that allows them not to admit they ever did anything wrong. As with Sennan, the movie’s climax is a showdown in the halls of Kasumigaseki with a bunch of youthful civil servants who know very little about the history of the problem being dispatched to receive the withering anger of people who have nothing left to lose. But this is even more intense, climaxing in a bit of showy violence when one plaintiff rips the notes out of the hand of a bureaucrat to find out if his “apology” is sincere or not. To make matters worse, these people essentially reenact this farce several days later in the Kumamoto Prefecture offices, where the governor says he will get down on his knees and apologize “if you want me to.”

Interspersed througout this drama are interludes with various victims of the disease, which offer the requisite human side of the tragedy, but, thanks to Hara’s immersive approach, give us a world beyond the hospitals and care homes. I was particularly moved by a man named Ikoma, who contracted Minamata Disease as a teenager and, despite the widespread prejudice against patients, wed a woman through an arranged marriage. When Hara finds out that the woman is Korean, his investigative antennae go up and he asks the couple and their matchmaker (another Minamata victim—one of the strongest suits of the film is the way it conveys a sense of community among patients) if anti-Korean prejudices had anything to do with the arrangement and the couple says it did not. Hara seems deflated, and, probably the audience is as well, and the mystery endures. Maybe that’s as it should be. As the movie so assiduously points out, some things just can’t be explained so neatly. 

In Japanese. Opens Nov. 27 in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Minamata Mandala home page in Japanese

photo (c) Shisso Production

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Media Mix, Nov. 20, 2021

Posted on November 21, 2021 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about a suit brought by two people on death row in Japan to do away with the practice of not informing condemned prisoners of their time of execution until only a few hours before it takes place. As pointed out in the column, only two G7 countries, the United States and Japan, still have the death penalty (some media say “only two developed countries…”), though the way executions are carried out is quite different. In the U.S., prisoners on death row usually know when they are scheduled to be put to death weeks or even months prior to the execution taking place, which gives them time to prepare and meet with loved ones—or with their lawyer perhaps to try and get a stay. In Japan, the justice minister simply signs the death warrant and the deed is done almost immediately. The prisoner has no time to prepare and neither does their lawyer, who probably doesn’t find out until it’s too late. Another major difference between the U.S. and Japan is the method of execution. In the U.S. it’s done through lethal injection, which is considered the most humane way of killing someone, though, according to the Harper’s article I cite in the column, there is a great deal of argument over just how painless it is. Apparently, one man actually survived a lethal injection and said afterwards that it felt as if the inside of his body was on fire. In Japan, hanging is the method; specifically the trap-door method which is meant to snap the neck so as to bring about instant death. Needless to say, there is no argument in Japan about whether this is the most humane way of killing someone since nobody talks about the death penalty, except to say that it should be an option for the worst kinds of crimes. Once a conviction and a sentence are confirmed, the discussion ends. The public overwhelmingly supports the death penalty, though no one, as far as I know, has carried out a survey asking how capital punishment should be carried out. The public trusts the state to make sure people convicted of heinous crimes are put to death, but they also expect the government to relieve them of the burden of having to think about it, which may be another reason why condemned prisoners don’t know when they’re going to die until, as I said in the column, the executioner actually comes knocking.

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Review: Little Girl

Posted on November 19, 2021 by philipbrasor

One of the stubborn myths attached to LGBTQ persons is the belief that their sexuality or gender identity is the result of social exposure. The subject of Sebastien Lifshitz’s documentary, Little Girl, is 8-year-old Sasha, who was assigned male at birth. However, according to her mother, Sasha already identified as female before she was three, a revelation that certainly challenges the social imprint myth. It is not Lifshitz’s aim to make any kind of analysis of what constitutes transexuality. In fact, his film has no voiceover narration or into-the-camera interviews with experts. It is observational in the clearest sense. We see Sasha and her parents interacting with one another and others in the most everyday ways, and while Sasha is very aware of her status as a transexual child, she never makes much of it. It’s other people who do.

Mainly it’s the people at her school, who have always identified her as a boy since that is what the paperwork says. Sasha lives in a small city in France and her school seems to have some association with conservative Christianity. Sasha’s parents have fully accepted her as a girl and want the school to acknowledge it, but they won’t. Lifshitz doesn’t have much access to the school officials in charge of this decision, so it’s mostly through third-person explanations that we find out, and while Sasha’s mother and father characterize the school’s attitude as hostile, Sasha rarely betrays any disappointment on screen. In fact, to say she’s well-adjusted might be an understatement. She knows why Lifshitz is there and is attentive to both his needs and her own self-image. In a sense, the movie isn’t so much about Sasha as it is a movie being made by Sasha with the help of the director. She performs, in a sense, but because she is still a child the performance is artless. 

Lifshitz avoids the most pressing question, which is how will Sasha navigate adolescence. Since that question is beyond his purview he is free to concentrate on the here and now, and the film’s presence is often startling. Several scenes take place in rooms with medical professionals who aren’t on hand to fix anything but rather sought by Sasha’s parents, who think they might convince the school of Sasha’s identity. The fact that Sasha herself joins in these often technical conversations proves that she already knows exactly who she is. It’s not precociousness, but rather a distinctly childlike sense of harmony with her situation. To put it another way, she’s quite a character.

In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670)

Little Girl home page in Japanese

photo (c) Agat Films & CIE – Arte France – Final Cut For real – 2020

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Media Mix, Nov. 13, 2021

Posted on November 14, 2021 by philipbrasor
Subaru’s new EV, developed in collaboration with Toyota

Here’s this week’s Media Mix (whose headline is different from the print edition’s and slightly misleading), which is about Toyota’s seemingly blase attitude toward electric vehicles. Based on what the press in Japan is reporting, this reluctance is built into the corporate culture and isn’t necessarily a negative reaction to climate activism. After all, Toyota did design the e-Palette people mover, as described in the column; it’s just that they rushed the project and ended up debuting something that didn’t work as it was supposed to. However, last week I found a post on Twitter that indicated Toyota’s aversion to electric vehicles may be more fundamental than I thought. A blog called Electrek, which is about EVs, published a letter from a parent who was alarmed at a pamphlet their daughter received at her Japanese elementary school. The pamphlet was distributed by Toyota and attempted to explain to children how EVs are great but still years away, which isn’t really the truth. The main thrust of their message is that hybrids are already here and do just as good a job in terms of carbon neutrality, which isn’t true either. More importantly, more autoworkers will be able to keep their jobs, which has always been Toyota’s main scare tactic when talking about how the rush to electric is not a good idea. Though the parent says that all Japanese car makers in a sense have been slow to adopt all-electric vehicles, only Toyota is aggressive in its anti-electric propaganda, and the parent finds it highly problematic that they would target children with this message, obviously with the idea of cultivating future customers for its hybrids and gasoline powered cars. As pointed out in the column, this mentality clashes with the government’s pledge to do away with internal combustion engines for passenger cars by the middle of the century, but given that Toyota remains the jewel in the Japanese industrial crown, questions arise as to how serious that pledge is. I tend to think it’s sincere as far as it goes, but they obviously allow themselves room to move, so until the government carries out concrete actions toward the realization of that goal the pledge is subject to doubt. 

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Review: The Man Who Sold His Skin

Posted on November 13, 2021 by philipbrasor

In the case of this multinational co-production, the usual opening gambit of claiming that the following story is based on true events for once raises arched eyebrows—at least in hindsight. A cursory internet search yields the intelligence that, in fact, a European artist did once tattoo his work on the back of a man and actually “sold” the artwork to a collector in 2008. The transaction in the movie is a bit more politically fraught, and while the story sells itself as a kind of satire, its thematic proximity to current headlines addressing the ever-changing dynamics in the Middle East keeps you constantly on the alert for any untoward humor you might derive from the action. 

The main thing being satirized is the art world, but unlike The Square, another tongue-in-cheek study of the limits of creativity that was nominated for a foreign film Oscar, The Man Who Sold His Skin finds room for empathy among its cynical set pieces. In a way it has to, because the artwork is a Syrian refugee named Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni), who has fled his homeland and his fiancee after falling afoul of the government. He not-so-innocently falls into the hands, so to speak, of the Belgian artist Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw), who is looking for a “canvas” on which to etch his brilliant conceptual art, a life-size tattoo of the so-called Schengen visa, which allows the holder to travel freely within the European Union, and is thus highly coveted by people trying to escape strife in their native lands. 

The director, Kaouther Ben Hania, has perhaps more fun with this premise than a lot of other filmmakers would ever dare to. Though Sam isn’t treated as a servant or an object by Godefroi, he is obligated to sit half-naked in galleries while patrons ogle his back and make any sort of unfortunate comments they want about his situation while not knowing anything about that situation; which is more complicated than they can imagine. Thanks to the visa on his back, he really can go anywhere in Europe he wants, and thanks to Godefroi, he can live fairly high on the hog (as long as he’s “working”). So while Sam remains a “victim” in the media scheme of things, his material circumstances are those of somebody who has lucked out big time. And for a while, he takes advantage of it to the point where he lords it over the hotel staff and parades around like a peacock when the fancy hits him. When a human rights organization tries to tell him that he’s being exploited at the expense of other refugees, he slams the door in their face.

The difficulty the viewer may have with this clever idea is that they are always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and while in the meantime we can enjoy Godefroi’s hilarious self-importance and the total hypocrisy fueling the “transgressive art” market, there’s the sinking feeling that Sam is headed for a fall or even worse. Ben Hania injects a few brilliantly affecting scenes involving terrorist tropes and long-distance romance, but in the end he has to address the elephant in the other room and opts simply to leave the door ajar. 

In English, Arabic and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya (03-3477-9264), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

The Man Who Sold His Skin home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020-Tanit Films-Cinetelefilms-Twenty Twenty Vision-Kwassa Films-Laika Film & Television-Metafora Productions-Film i Vast-Istiqlal Films-A.R.T.-Voo & Be TV

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