Born in 1985, raised in Kanagawa, Japan, Natsuka Kusano, after graduating from Tokai University's School of Cultural Studies (Department of Creative Writing), completed the 12th Fiction Course of the Film School of Tokyo. In 2014 she directed her first feature-length film, “Antonym” (“Rasen Ginga”), which received both the Skip City Award and Best Director Award at the 11th Skip City International D-Cinema Festival in Saitama, Japan. The film tells of two friends struggling with writing a radio play. Her second feature-length film, “Domains”, was created on the invitation of Aichi Arts Center, Japan, and was screened, for its world premiere, at International Film Festival Rotterdam. This film is the story of a murder, staged with dialogues like in an actors' table-read. Her third feature film, a medium-length film, “Till the End of the Dream”, was premiered at the last edition of FIDMarseille. This film is about a woman alone, Yoshimi, who tries...
- 9/17/2023
- by Guest Writer
- AsianMoviePulse
After moving into a new house, a young woman becomes convinced her life is about to end in an eerie drama about mortality and contagious panic
Back in March, I wrote that Natsuka Kusano’s Domains was the first film that really spoke to the Covid-19 era. Well, here is the second, from actor-turned-auteur Amy Seimetz: a haunting drama of what happens when despair goes viral, and the R number governing shivery existential panic gets above 1. It’s an eerie essay in creeping dread and collective hysteria, about the fear of something awful just outside your field of vision.
She Dies Tomorrow is a scary movie that behaves non-generically but by no means non-scarily, more like an indie-stonewashed realist American picture than a psychological horror. There’s an obvious influence. It resembles the eerily atmospheric work of director Shane Carruth – Seimetz’s ex-boyfriend.
Back in March, I wrote that Natsuka Kusano’s Domains was the first film that really spoke to the Covid-19 era. Well, here is the second, from actor-turned-auteur Amy Seimetz: a haunting drama of what happens when despair goes viral, and the R number governing shivery existential panic gets above 1. It’s an eerie essay in creeping dread and collective hysteria, about the fear of something awful just outside your field of vision.
She Dies Tomorrow is a scary movie that behaves non-generically but by no means non-scarily, more like an indie-stonewashed realist American picture than a psychological horror. There’s an obvious influence. It resembles the eerily atmospheric work of director Shane Carruth – Seimetz’s ex-boyfriend.
- 8/26/2020
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
This stark, experimental drama about a woman in a troubled marriage who reconnects with an old friend is the first movie of the coronavirus era
The first movie of the coronaviral era is already here. Domains, from Japanese film-maker Natsuka Kusano, premiered last year at the Rotterdam film festival, so it was conceived and made well before the outbreak. But with eerie relevance, it speaks to the spirit of our times, featuring sparsely populated or empty streets, characters who always stay a few feet apart, who don’t touch and rarely speak face-to-face, and in any case only with a weird dislocation and alienation. There’s a character who objects to the isolation in which another character appears to be locking down his family and demands to know if this man considers her a “virus” who has to be kept well away. In her own domain, in fact.
Along with many others recently,...
The first movie of the coronaviral era is already here. Domains, from Japanese film-maker Natsuka Kusano, premiered last year at the Rotterdam film festival, so it was conceived and made well before the outbreak. But with eerie relevance, it speaks to the spirit of our times, featuring sparsely populated or empty streets, characters who always stay a few feet apart, who don’t touch and rarely speak face-to-face, and in any case only with a weird dislocation and alienation. There’s a character who objects to the isolation in which another character appears to be locking down his family and demands to know if this man considers her a “virus” who has to be kept well away. In her own domain, in fact.
Along with many others recently,...
- 3/25/2020
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Natsuka Kusano's Domains is exclusively showing March 12 - April 10, 2020 in Mubi's Undiscovered series.For her second feature, Domains, Natsuka Kusano wanted to make a film that can witness an actor's transformation. In Japanese, she uses the term 事件 (jiken) or "case" in reference to this transformation, like a case of a crime or an event. In Domains there are indeed two cases operating on a fictional and non-fictional level: the investigation of the murder of a young girl (fiction) and the investigation of actors rehearsing their roles (non-fiction). The film opens with a policeman (Kenta Ryu) reading back a statement by Aki Takemoto (Asami Shibuya) on murdering her friend's three-year-old daughter, Honoka. As the policeman reads back her words to confirm that there are no mistakes, Aki sits, looking detached. The recounting is chronological and the retelling is eerily mundane.
- 3/12/2020
- MUBI
A policeman reads a taciturn woman her statement back to her, a confession of killing her friend’s child. She reacts minimally, either disconnected or disassociated, and when the policeman informs her that her confession will lead to judgement, she foggily explains she has already been judged—by something, something "like time." This strange transition from a criminal drama to intangible abstraction is the suggestive opening to Natsuka Kusano’s second feature Domains, where this terrible crime and the genre story attached to it—how did this murder come about, why did the woman kill the child, what will happen to her?—are a misdirection. The truly important part of this prelude was the fact that the policeman read out loud the woman’s story for her, because what follows over the next two and a half hours in this bold venture is just that: reading. After some credits, Kusano...
- 1/28/2019
- MUBI
Around The World When You Were My AgeThe titles for the 48th International Film Festival Rotterdam are being announced in anticipation of the event running January 23 – February 3, 2018. We will update the program as new films are revealed.Tiger COMPETITIONSons of Denmark (Ulaa Salim)Take Me Somewhere Nice (Ena Sendijarević)Present.Perfect. (Shengze Zhu)Sheena667 (Grigory Dobrygin)Nona. If They Soak Me, I’ll Burn Them (Camila José Donoso)Koko-di Koko-da (Johannes Nyholm)Els dies que vindran (Carlos Marqués-Marcet)Bright Future COMPETITIONAlva (Ico Costa)Chèche lavi (Sam Ellison)De nuevo otra vez (Romina Paula)Doozy (Richard Squires)Dreissig (Simona Kostova)Ende der Saison (Elmar Imanov)Fabiana (Brunna Laboissière)The Gold-Laden Sheep & the Sacred Mountain (Ridham Janve)Heroes (Köken Ergun)Historia de mi nombre (Karin Cuyul)Last Night I Saw You Smiling (Kavich Neang)Lost Holiday (Michael Kerry Matthews/Thomas Matthews)Maggie (Yi Okseop)Mens (Isabelle Prim)No Data Plan (Miko Revereza...
- 1/9/2019
- MUBI
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