Videophobia

Details

This special limited edition spot gloss slipcover is limited to 2,000 units and is only available here at VinegarSyndrome.com!

Named after Yasujiro Ozu’s custom-made, tatami-level, crab-like tripod, Kani is a new home video label dedicated to leveling the gaze and furthering the understanding of Asian cinema in North America. Focused on genre-defying films, Kani aims to expand the canon, bolster up-and-coming filmmakers and reintroduce repertory classics in context. Vinegar Syndrome’s sister company, OCN Distribution, is thrilled to be representing this diverse and unique home video line!

Ai (a superbly laconic Tomona Hirota) haunts the streets of Osaka dressed as a mascot. After going home with a stranger, she wakes up to find footage of their intimate encounter uploaded to a porn site. As all systems of recourse and remedy fail her, her sense of dislocation and alienation intensifies and Ai resorts to a strange solution.

Following the rap-inflected drama YAMATO (CALIFORNIA) and the globe-trotting TOURISM, Daisuke Miyazaki unveils another potent subversion of the so-called monolith of Japanese culture. VIDEPHOBIA unfolds as paranoid techno-thriller about identity, set on the backstreets of an industrial and multicultural Osaka captured here in beautiful, stark black-and-white. Concerns with obsessive image-making and issues of surveillance and consent in the digital age are embodied in the plight of a young woman from the city’s Koreatown; in an eerie film about the self – watching us as much as we watch it.

Paired here with the newly commissioned, companion short I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR, starring Tomona Hirota and Sumira Ashina.

directed by: Daisuke Miyazaki
starring: Tomona Hirota, Sumire Ashina, Shugo Oshinari, Sahel Rosa, Aki Morita
2020 / 89 min / 1.85:1 / Japanese Stereo

Additional info:

• Region Free Blu-ray
• High Definition Presentation
• Video Introduction by Director Daisuke Miyazaki
• Newly Commissioned Short Film, “i’ll Be Your Mirror” (2022, 9mins)
• Videophobia MV by Baku Feat. Jin Dogg, Nunchaku (Tatsuro Mukai, Kumi), Tomy Wealth
• Booklet Feat. An Interview With the Director by justine Smith and Behind-the-scenes Photographs
• Japanese Theatrical Trailer
• Optional English / Japanese / Chinese Subtitles
• 1 Transparent Sticker
• New Cover Art
• English SDH subtitles