Lovers on Borders

My new film was born out of a pure desire to experiment. One finds commonalities in themes and visual methods among totally different movies, such as those of John Ford and Ozu, or Jean Renoir and Edward Yang, or Claude Chabrol and Mikio Naruse. Maybe you are watching modern Chinese indie cinema, and you suddenly remember a scene from Rossellini. Your thoughts transcend times and places as you find connections in themes or visuals, some gestures or mise-en-scene. This is what makes today's world cinema experience special, I believe. I wanted to create this mind-movement within ONE film.

LOVERS ON BORDERS is a film of double revenge stories set against the backdrop of two historic catastrophes -- the great earthquake in 18th-century Portugal and triple-disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in 21st-century Japan -- both initially caused by nature but yet greatly influential on the thinking of philosophers, artists, and common people in their respective times, leading to dark eras in which social gaps widened drastically. The rich becoming richer, poor becoming poorer, and marginalized more marginalized. In the first episode, the Portuguese aristocrat Gasper de Carvalho seeks revenge against Japanese descendants, long after his ancestor, a missionary, was burned to death in Japan. (It is the opposite side of Scorsese's SILENCE.) Three centuries later in 2021 -- ten years after Fukushima and a year after the Tokyo Olympics -- Japan is deep in recession, and rural factories under nationalist pressure are laying off immigrant workers from Brazil, forcing even ethnically Japanese Brazilians to return to their country of birth.

Borders and boundaries appear in different ways. Class difference and hierarchy were strong in 18th Century, differences of nationality influential in 21st Century. And yet “borders” have always been inventions, or in a manner of speaking, fictional constructs created by humanity. In the worlds of animals and plants, borders/delineations of this kind do not exist. I wanted to depict the irony of loving relationships and friendships being frustrated these essentially fictional constructs. Though the lovers are torn apart, their fates nonetheless remain connected by a karmic cycle that defies the mundane worldly concerns of their times.

Now we have entered a new era of Trump’s “America-First” — kicking out immigrants and drawing stricter borders, not only isolating the US, but also enhancing the global trends of exceptionalism and nationalism. Further, the irresponsible actions of North Korea, Israel, and Japan (under Abe!) are pouring oil on the flames.

My film is intended to throws questions at these trends. Why do humans consider themselves "exceptional" and fear "outsiders"? Why does xenophobia drive nations to draw more borders and delineations? Through the two episodes of LOVERS ON BORDERS, one can perceive the echoes of time, contemplating what we usually ignore in our repetitive daily lives. Borders are constantly disappearing, materializing, and transforming with the times, but are human beings actually evolving?

Atsushi Funahashi