Akame 48 Waterfalls (Akame shijyuyataki shinjyumisui)
Arato Genjiro is the long-term producer of many films by the famed director Seijin Suzuki (whose season of abstract pistol operas was a highlight of AFF 03). Akame centres on the flight of a novelist who hides out from his life in an underworld slum west of Osaka, full of prostitutes, gangsters and tattooists. He ekes out a living threading meat skewers, but slowly he is drawn into an intense physical relationship with a woman (Terajima Shinobu, in the role which won her a Japan Academy Award) who has an unpayable debt to the mob. The popular tourist spot Akame 48 Waterfalls is also a well known suicide destination, and the deeper problems of the traps that the protagonists are in are played out against the backdrop of the wild beauty of the falls. It sounds like a story for a wild man like Miike Takashi or Takeshi Kitano but Akame is more typical of an absorbing movement in Japanese cinema in which silence, duration and missed opportunities are the dramatic media through which to express the emerging sense of a lack of purpose in Japanese life. How do you die for something when you don't have the courage to live for anything?
Reviews
“Opens up a realm of meaning.”
Övgü Gökce, FIPRESCI
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When
11:45 AM Friday, 25 February
Buy Tickets Online
Greater Union - Cinema 2
2:15 PM Tuesday, 1 March
Buy Tickets Online
Mercury Cinema
Ticket Price
Full price $14
Industry $12
SPU Concession $10
As Part Of
General FeaturesAbout Akame 48 Waterfalls
159 minutes35mm
2.35:1
DTS Stereo
In Japanese with English subtitles
Print Source
Tohokoshinsha Film Corporation
Mika Umehashi
kokusai@tfc.co.jp
Awards
Best Film Blue Ribbon Awards Japan 2004Festivals
Berlin 2004Brisbane 2004
About the Director
Genjirou Arato
Japanese-born Genjirou Arato began his film career as a producer. His partnership with the filmmaker Seijun Suzuki lasted over a decade and resulted in three films. Afterwards he produced films by the acclaimed filmmaker Junji Sakamoto. He made his directing debut with The Girl of Silence. This is his second feature film.
Filmography
Akame 48 Waterfalls (2004)The Girl of Silence (1995)
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