Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Kafka's
Metamorphosis, wakes up one morning and discovers that he has turned into a giant insect. We're all familiar with the story, but what we aren't familiar with - or daren't imagine - is that even worse mornings can exist. Ask Tagami Akira, the protagonist of
Ueda Shinichiro's mindblowing
Popuran, who wakes up one morning to discover that he has lost his "buddy"! The speech-marks are there to highlight that we're not talking about a person. Oh no - we're talking about an exclusively male anatomical element...
After blowing Far East Film Festival audiences away with One Cut of The Dead, which in the meantime has rightly become an international cult smash, Ueda Shinichiro returns to the FEFF with this new and irresistible feature. A hilarious and edgy moral comedy where those who do bad deeds and feel no remorse are punished by bizarre retaliation. Because Tagami Akira (
Minagawa Yoji,
FEFF guest in 2019 with
Melancholic), a bad father, bad husband and bad friend, isn't the only one to lose his "buddy": the skies over Japan are full of flying objects... aggressive, fast and very, very identifiable! What can they do to bring things back to normal?
A brilliant catalogue of egotistical behaviour and redemption which is always careful to avoid slipping into cliches or sentimentality,
Popuran is a story that would have appealed to Dino Buzzati and that the
Fareasters who are eagerly awaited in Udine
from the 22nd to the 30th of April will love.
And don't forget that
until the 7th of March you can buy one of the three accreditation packages developed for FEFF 24 - the Red Panda, the Black Dragon and the White Tiger - online at a
special price (
all info on the accreditation page).