Tokyo festival features Yoshida's films of hope amid despair

TOKYO (AP) — Boxers, janitors, fishermen, the heroes of Keisuke Yoshida’s movies are Japanese society’s angst-filled losers, struggling against odds in a violent, imperfect, often-crazed world.

The Japanese director and his three latest works are being featured at the Tokyo International Film Festival, opening Oct. 30.

“When you think about how the world can become a better place, what’s at the bottom of the problem is a lack of imagination. The theme of my latest film is about this sensitivity, the ability to imagine even in a little way what others may be going through, to overcome and soften the divides,” Yoshida told The Associated Press recently.

Yoshida’s works explore the dark side of the human condition, like petty jealousies and shameful guilt, although he insists he believes in the potential for change, what he calls “taking that first step” out of despair.

In “Intolerance,” for which Yoshida also wrote the screenplay, Arata Furuta delivers a gut-wrenching performance as the stoic main character, who loses his daughter in a car crash. The fisherman has never fully expressed his love for his daughter while she was alive and can’t get over her death.

He goes on a relentlessly cruel pursuit of a grocery store manager he blames for his daughter's death because the manager had chased the young woman on suspicion of shoplifting. The film portrays how Japanese society, often working like a claustrophobic village, ostracizes and punishes what it sees as erring individuals. The frenzied mass media add to the pressure.

Yet the heartbreaking ending expresses that tiny bit of hope Yoshida has in mind in all his movies.

“There is the theme of what is right versus what is wrong, which is easy to understand. But on another level, I wanted to depict how each individual comes to terms with what is lost. That’s how I began on this story,” he said.

Another festival feature is “Hime-Anole,” based on a manga, or Japanese comic, centering on two youngsters who clean buildings. They run into a former schoolmate, who, as it turns out, has become a serial killer.

The title refers to a lizard and symbolizes a life to be consumed as food by a stronger predator.