Roji-E

Experimental, fictionalised documentary about the Japanese writer Nakagami Kenji, who died young in 1992. Nakagami was the chronicler of the seaside town of Shingu. Many of Nakagami’s stories are set in a specific alley in Shingu, an alley that has now gone, but that lives on in the fiction of Nakagami. And also on celluloid, because the writer filmed the alley before its demolition.In the film by Aoyama Shinji, the film-maker Izuchi Kisshu goes in search of what is left of Nakagami’s alley. The specific mood of the small harbour town however turns out to be difficult to find. In the film, the film-maker reads the books of Nakagami out loud for us at the locations where they are set, but it is difficult to invoke the magic. Time and again, film-maker Aoyama returns to the film images made by Nakagami, while the film-maker in the film seems to search in vain in the present.To the Alley is an unusual homage to a specific mood: the mood of the harbour town that is vulnerable and precious yet can disappear just like that. See also: Eureka. (GjZ)