Ian Kerkhof’s new film boldly clashes genre conventions in a digital melt that seeks to invent a new form of film-making appropriate to the new digital age. On this occasion he is working with a Japanese producer and shooting in Japan with the enormously flexible and light DV camera, ‘re-mixing’ his material on the infinitely flexible AVID editing equipment to create a film for the big screen.No surprise, this determined renegade film-maker takes the opportunity to mix crime film, art film and porn movie. Thom Hoffman plays a young guy in Tokyo who gets out of prison, to discover that he has seven days to live – because either the cops will get him or the Yakuza will. Living under the pressure of this countdown to his own death, in a bar he runs into a beautiful Japanese girl – played by the famous and beautiful Japanese erotic actress Honisho Mai – and they begin a relations«hip, an intense and passionate affair that goes to often extreme limits… Kerkhof presents it in all its graphic, sexual intimacy, crossing boundaries of narrative propriety with impunity. The essentially simple story is made into a complex and ambitious mosaic, interweaving past and present with great flexibility.Shabondama Elegy suggests the beginning of new beauties that will be available to cinema in this fledgling combination of formats: small camera – large screen.
