| Tallinn 2011 Foundation | Tallinn 2011-European Capital of Culture |
Film director Naomi Kawase (center) at the project press conference in Cannes International Film Festival
60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero is a unique cinematic installation consisting of one-minute silent short films, the cinematic love letters to film as an art form and 35mm film as a medium from 60 film directors, invited to join to a monumental feature and artwork. These films are like love letters from directors to cinema.
Sten-Kristian Saluveer, CEO of NPO 60 sec came to Japan in October 2010 for Tokyo International Film Festival, and had meetings with people in the Japanese movie industry . For now, three Japanese directors are going to participate in the program. Ms. Naomi Kawashima participated in the Cannes International Film Festival in May 2011, and she had a press conference about the "60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero". Many media introduced the program to the public.
The screening will take place in the open air on the coast of Tallinn Bay. A special construction comprising a screen and projector will be built for the event which will allow the actual filmstrip to be burnt at the same time as the film is shown.
The year 2011 witnesses a change in the history of film. The 35mm film, the celluloid, is giving way to new film-like techniques and marking the end of an era in the art of cinema.
60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero is a homage to the non-commodified art of cinema and 35mm celluloid film, as the holy medium of film art. The installation is a romantic potlatch, pure spending, a monumental piece on the last shared moments of man and cinema, a statue to everything valuable and indivisible, which fills life, but can only be expressed by cinema.
Naomi Kawase is a Japanese film director. Many of her works have been documentaries jet known also as she became the youngest winner of la Cam?ra d'Or award (the award for the best new director) at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for her first 35mm film Moe no Suzaku (1997). She won the Grand Prix at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for Mogari no Mori. Her last full-feature film Hanezu was premiered In Competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. After graduating in 1989 from the Osaka School of Photography (now Visual Arts College Osaka), where she was a student of Shunji Dodo, she spent an additional four years there as a lecturer before releasing Embracing. She novelized her films Moe no Suzaku and Firefly (2000). And made quite a few feature films by now.
http://www.kawasenaomi.com/
Shinji Aoyama is a Japanese film director, screenwriter, composer, and novelist. He graduated in 1989 from Rikkyo University, where he majored in film studies in the department of British and American Studies. While he was a student, he was deeply influenced by the theorist and film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, from whom he took classes. In 1995 he made his directorial debut with the Vcinema production Kyokasho ni nai! (Very Private Lesson), based on the manga publication of the same name. In 1996 Aoyama made Helpless, a film set in his native Fukuoka. His 2000 film Eureka, also set in Fukuoka, opened at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival where it received both the FIPRESCI prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Together with the 2007 film Sad Vacation (2007), Eureka (2000) and Helpless (1996) comprise Aoyama's "Kitakyushu Saga".
Gakuryu Ishii is a film director from Japan known for his striking visuals and sometimes outlandish subject matter. He became in Japan already with his early work, a favorite amongs rebel and punk cineastes in Japan. He attended the Nihon University College of Art. There, with the aid of friends, he directed an 8 mm short named Panic High School (1978) (also known as The Solitude Of One Man Divided By 880,000 and Charge! Hooligans of Hakata). The film, about a student rebellion when a school's administration refuses to acknowledge complicity for a student's suicide, garnered him attention outside of school and was released theatrically. In 1982, he directed Burst City, a stylish action film about a wild gang of quasi-mutant bikers who ride into a town staging protests against the construction of a nearby nuclear reactor plant. In 1984, Ishii directed his most widelyacclaimed movie to that point, The Crazy Family, the title of which literally translates to The Back-Firing Family (or more crudely, "the fucked-up family"). A savage satire of Japanese family life, it depicted an average household (mother, father, son, daughter, and later grandfather) moving into a new Tokyo home, only to have their perfect life collapse due to pressures from within and without. The film garnered the Grand Prix at the Saruso Film Festival.
