Screenings index

Spyder

dir. Ishibashi Kiyomi / Japan 2009 / 115’

subtitles: Polish and English

New Horizons International Competition A Lake, Burrowing, Dazzle, $e11.ou7! – Sell Out!, Exhausted, Face, Helen, Hunger, Iréne, Mock up on Mu, Ne change rien, Oxygen, Spyder, Twilight Dancing Section index

Cast

Kiyomi Ishibashi, Tokue Matsuda, Noriko Koshida, Michihide Imai

Film description

Made entirely with a cell-phone, an original independent film, inspired by a short story by Thierry-Acot Mirande. Kiyomi Ishibashi enters the world of a young girl who lives in an anonymous Japanese metropolis.Spyder (the character's name is derived from the English word spy) works as a waitress, but she strives to change her life. By chance, the girl meets a film crew in a street and as a result she becomes interested in cinema. She starts working, first as a stunt woman, then as an actress...

From this moment, the plot is purposefully dispersed. We cannot tell, exactly, if what we are watching are scenes from the film in which the actress Spyder plays a girl who wanders in a mysterious house, suffering because of an ill-fated love, or whether these are flashbacks of the character's earlier life.Scenes are intertwined, realities and images are mixed; we experience a subjective, multi-facetted look at reality, an inimitable écriture féminine.

Spyder is one of the most radical offerings of contemporary cinema.It shows an entirely new dimension of a woman's life - the ever-recurring subject of Japanese cinema from Kenji Mizoguchi to Hiroshi Teshigahara to Shōhei Imamura.

Piotr Kletowski