Conversation with a Cactus

In the 1970s, the Hashimoto husband-and-wife team tried to teach a cactus the Japanese alphabet, using a lie detector to turn the plant’s reactions into sound and thereby give it a voice. The goal was to use plants as potential witnesses in murder investigations. Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky were granted access to the archive and were the first to translate the experiments into English. Mr Hashimoto, a former Fuji director, contributed to the development of the Giant LED and Neon Panel technology.
Technology and cultural traditions combine throughout the film, such as in the fictional story set in Tokyo’s suburbs, an environment known for its animist traditions, ultra-technology and the ‘politics of silence’. The film is an airy, dreamy exploration of the self and the other, of myth and history, truth and lies, in relation to the Hashimoto experiment.

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