Two Films by Masashi Yamamoto

Two Films by Masashi Yamamoto

2 Episodes

Celebrating the drop-outs, slackers, bohemians, and misfits who live in opposition to the mainstream, the freewheeling, blissfully batty films of punk auteur Masashi Yamamoto are gonzo transmissions from the fringes of the Japanese underground. Defiantly DIY rebukes to the capitalist excesses of Japan in the 1980s and early ’90s, the newly restored revelations ROBINSON’S GARDEN and WHAT’S UP CONNECTION—the former lensed by frequent Jim Jarmusch collaborator Tom DiCillo; the latter a rare bilingual Japan–Hong Kong coproduction—are a perfect introduction to Yamamoto’s cinema of outsiders.

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Two Films by Masashi Yamamoto
  • Robinson’s Garden

    Episode 1

    Directed by Masashi Yamamoto • 1987 • Japan
    Starring Kumiko Ota, Kou Machida, Tuko Ueno

    On a drunken walk home, bohemian drug dealer Kumi (Kumiko Ohta) discovers an abandoned building on the outskirts of Tokyo. Attracted by the vast, untapped space overrun with luxuriant vegetation (and its pote...

  • What’s Up Connection

    Episode 2

    Directed by Masashi Yamamoto • 1990 • Japan, Hong Kong
    Starring Reiko Arai, Tse Wai-Kit, Li Cheong

    When Hong Kong teenager Chi Gau Shin (Tse Wai-Kit) wins a trip to Japan, he begins a journey that takes him from his small fishing village to Tokyo by way of Kamagasaki—the so-called slums of Osaka...