Q&A with Director SASHA GRANSJEAN
What was your inspiration for the film?
I have been living in Koreatown for over a decade and have noticed an exceptional amount of stores, places, and people here and there that live on amidst the chaos of this sprawling city like wormholes into another time. I wanted to tell a story using one of those wormholes.
How did the film get off the ground? What was the process of getting the film made?
I had seen the pet fish shop many times as it was in my neighborhood and I remember once or twice peering in and seeing Kyoto’s face looking back at me. One day, I went in and looked around, chatted him up a bit, and basically bought some garbage used tubing for air pumps that I wanted to use in a music video I was making at the time. We hit it off I guess, and I was left longing for a more in depth visual exploration of that environment. I believe I asked him if that would be okay and the time and he gave an emphatic, yes.
I asked my friend and photographer, CHIKA OKAZUMI, to join me so that we could shoot some video of the fish tanks and all the things strewn around that had been there since the 70s, easy. I originally had an idea for a kind of magical realism love story of sorts that involved people coming into that shop and having their lives altered by the fish they bought. That story was never finished and in filming around his shop we ended up interviewing him and feeling compelled to visit him again, eventually becoming friends.
When he was being evicted he called me up to tell me that it was going to happen and that I should come with my cameras, I didn’t entirely believe him at that time because it seemed like he could have just have easily lived the rest of his life out there in that shop, forgotten from society.
Over the course of the two and a half years that we maintained a friendship, Kyoto told me a lot of the socialist ideas that he came to this country with in the 60s. A lot of them sounded more relevant today than they may have even done then. He despaired that his life was in vain and that he would never get a chance to tell those ideas to people so I thought that in making this film he could.
It took a lot of time to sort through the conversations we had and I honestly didn’t know if there would be a story at the end of the day so in editing I set out to just try and chronicle the journey as best as possible with what footage and audio dialogue I had and then I moved to visually stylizing and molding the ideas to feel as if they are being told to us (or the kid from the future played by TAKUTO KAWABE) from a sort of digital stream of this portion of his life.
What format did you shoot the film on?
The whole thing is shot on Canon DSLRs and is almost entirely handheld save for maybe a few shots like the one in the hospital bed where I had the camera clamped onto the cabinet on top of the TV.
What do you think the essence of the film and its characters are
Pursuing your dreams and kindness to others.
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind