Berlin

In his earlier film Mienai/Blind Alley, also included in this programme, Riju Go strived for perfect deception. In Berlin he uses fake documentary elements to tell his story, not for the deceptive effect but to achieve a narrative authenticity and vitality. The story of the sudden disappearance of the prostitute Kyoko is built up from the pieces of a puzzle; some of these are plain drama film (albeit shot by cameraman Shinoda Noboru in a fluent documentary style), others pieces are pure mockumentary, or even fake-in-fake documentary when the viewer follows a TV news crew. Kyoko is evoked in an indirect yet effective way by the people who go looking for her and come into contact with the shadowy world she lived in. Kyoko was very popular with the people she knew. Her contagious good humour spread like a warm blanket over the people she met. Kyoko seemed an uncomplicated, frisky and pretty frivolous baby-doll, but as Riju provides more pieces of the puzzle, the film acquires an increasingly sombre tone. The people who are so doggedly looking for Kyoko primarily find something out about themselves.Typically in contemporary hyper-realistic Japanese cinema the grimmer and more aggressive moments are not omitted. The title of the film refers to an amulet belonging to Kyoko that was made from a piece of stone from the Berlin Wall.