Videophobia

Ai (a superbly laconic Tomona Hirota) haunts the streets of Osaka dressed as a mascot. After going home with a stranger, she wakes up to find footage of their intimate encounter uploaded to a porn site. As all systems of recourse and remedy fail her and her sense of dislocation and alienation intensifies, Ai resorts to a strange solution.

Following the rap-inflected drama Yamato (California) and the globe-trotting Tourism, Daisuke Miyazaki unveils another potent subversion of the so-called monolith of Japanese culture. Videophobia unfolds as paranoid techno-thriller about identity, set on the backstreets of an industrial and multicultural Osaka captured here in beautiful, stark black-and-white. Concerns with obsessive image-making and issues of surveillance and consent in the digital age are embodied in the plight of a young woman from the city’s Koreatown; in an eerie film about the self – watching us as much as we watch it.