This film was shot on 16mm film every 13-seconds from the same position for five years. No digital trickery was used. The filmmaker used multiple exposures to capture the setting sun and then repeatedly merged time-lapses to create the hypnotic images that pass by. 13 is a poetic record of the passage of time and a creative act of personal imagery, much like painting a picture, which the audience is left to interpret.

A female temp worker complains to a large company about the leaking of personal information. The stone hurled by this modern-day David facing the Goliath of a major company is flung back as a mechanical apology. With direction that rejects generalizations about vulnerable people and emotional involvement,  the audience becomes the focus more than the film’s characters do. The film presents social issues as moving images for the audience to question the conditions of being human in today’s difficult circumstances that deprive us of our creativity.

The traffic light for cars turns red and the pedestrian light turns green. A wave of people begins to cross the street. The film creates a montage of single frames taken from many videos of a diverse array of “pedestrians” from various times and places. A dizzying series of images and sounds creates a strangely pleasant sensation. This film is the latest work from Kazuhiro GOSHIMA, a filmmaker whose experimental images disassemble and reconstruct the human senses.

On Time Off Time is the newest work from Hirotoshi IWASAKI, who has received acclaim in Japan and overseas for his consistent style utilizing the rotoscope technique: a man diving into the water, women dancing hand in hand, a boy and dog tossing and turning in their sleep, a woman walking, and a man doing farm work. We see the movements of these human beings and animals repeated on a screen divided into multiple segments, sometimes inverted vertically or horizontally. The resonance that emerges from this confusion is a true delight.

The latest work by Yuri MURAOKA brings to light her own trials and tribulations and those of her family as she continues to create while suffering from schizophrenia. Transparent I am is based on a poem written during the Covid-19 crisis. The mask she wears to shield against the world will imminently become a screen, projecting her numerous past works. This powerful self-portrait film won the Grand Prix at the 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

A graduate of Tokyo Zokei University’s graduate school and Image Forum Institute of Moving Image, Shinya Isobe’s major works include dance (2009), Eden (2011), For rest (2017), and 13 (2020).

Sung Nam Han’s diverse work includes the production and exhibition of single-channel moving image works, moving image installations, AR works, and moving image/theater/dance performances based on the concept of “superlinear.” In recent years, she has exhibited various forms of art that focus on the media of moving images and examine the viewing of blue screen, wearable, and pocketable moving images. She has served as the director of the Interdisciplinary Art Festival Tokyo since 2014.

Born in Shizuoka in 1969, GOSHIMA creates films and installations, which reconstruct visual images and cinematic principles. His main works include an unique three-dimensional film, Shadowland (2013), and This May Not Be a Movie (2014), a physical movie camera system that records video without traditional consecutive frames.

Hirotoshi IWASAKI was born in 1981 in Ibaraki. He is currently completing a PhD in Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts . By contrasting rotoscope animation with 20th century cultural movements in art, such as Surrealism, IWASAKI has successfully established his own rotoscope theory and continues his research and experiments in this field. His other works include DARK MIXER (2014).

Born in Tokyo in 1981, Yuri MURAOKA graduated from Image Forum Institute of Moving Image, and is now a director, writer, and mother of two children. Her works mainly focus on the “self-portrait”, self-created and self-performed. Among her major works are Schizophrenia (2016) and Transparent, the world is (2019). She has been creating poetic works since 2018, and continues to create her visually stunning and powerful self-portrait film essays.