Screening: Takashi Ito's DISTANT VOICES

DISTANT VOICES (2024) is the brand new feature film from Takashi Ito (b. 1956). Ito has been a crucial figure in the history of avant-garde film for many decades, constructing evocative and haunted short films that bridge the everyday with the otherworldly. Painstakingly edited, his works were initially influenced by his mentor, Toshio Matsumoto, while he was a student at the Kyūshū Institute of Design. In 1984, he explained that film is able to construct a "vivid reality" that is specific to the medium itself, and that his primary goal is "draw the audience into a vortex of supernatural illusion." His newest film DISTANT VOICES follows suit, and is in line with his recent trajectory of experimenting with creating longform digital works. The film follows two girls engaging in some magical form of communication—both with and through each other—across various liminal spaces. "A field of wilted sunflowers, a group of public housing units turned into ruins. Two girls who are like alter egos of each other. They wander around with a camera, one pointing it at mysterious things and at herself, the other hanging a black dress in various places and taking pictures of it.

Critic and curator Joshua Minsoo Kim of Tone Glow will be present to introduce the film.

This is the first North American run of this film and presented in partnership with Collaborative Cataloging Japan and Tone Glow.