Louis Vuitton Hawaii International FIlm Festival 2008

A masterly cinematic triptych, TOKYO! offers three charming tales that, through their levity, confront a number of social and philosophical issues. Transcending the bounds of what its title normally designates, INTERIOR DESIGN tracks the self-fashioning of a woman who, in response to feeling invisible and unimportant to her boyfriend, traces a line of flight with and into her imagination to locate a feeling of self-worth within invisibility itself. MERDE elucidates that the formation of absolute Otherness can erupt only from within the bowels of the space opposed to it. SHAKING TOKYO, by pointing to the inability to forget debts to alterity by resorting to absolute reclusiveness, depicts the figure of the hikikomori as one for whom the slightest connect produces seismic reactions. Taken together, the film shorts resonate to produce heterogeneous images of Tokyo such that the city cannot be narrativized within a single frame, but rather, demands situated engagements by multiple constituencies to reveal incredibly rich and overlapping navigations of the cityscape in which diverse sites of intimacy and alienation become im/possible.