Manifesto establishes a multifaceted portrait of an arts academy which has been recently subsumed into a large national university. Through frank and revealing discussions with students, teachers, administrators and other staff, Ane Hjort Guttu establishes links between seemingly disparate topics—from architecture and surveillance to neoliberalism and dysfunctionality—embedded within the framework of contemporary academia.
Manifesto establishes a multifaceted portrait of an arts academy which has been recently subsumed into a large national university. Through frank and revealing discussions with students, teachers, administrators and other staff, Ane Hjort Guttu establishes links between seemingly disparate topics—from architecture and surveillance to neoliberalism and dysfunctionality—embedded within the framework of contemporary academia.
The director, a former insurance man in Tokyo, took a chance to build a new life as an artist in Norway. He recalls a vague childhood memory of his Uncle Yuji, the Tokyo hippie who left for New York to play salsa in Spanish Harlem in the late 70’s. This film presents his first meeting with Yuji in his New York apartment in 2015, and the life of a solitary artist who, for the past 40 years, has chosen to not perform for an audience. Mixed emotions of initial admiration and the realisation of what it means to live as an artist through a lifetime is presented both in the story of Yuji’s life and through the making of the film itself. —Daisuke Kosugi
Art director Naoki Hayakawa works 16 hours a day in a creative, neo-totalitarian advertisement company in Tokyo. The pressure of this situation causes him to regularly lapse into a twilight state between sleep and wakefulness, where he has strange and wonderful dreams. When he tells his superiors about his troubled state of mind, they ask that he exploit these dreams by using ideas from them in his work. This triggers a different sort of crisis as Naoki realises his whole self is being instrumentalised.
What is the true cost of a bargain? A comic encounter between a Swedish salesman and a Norwegian couple on their monthly bargain hunting at the border between Norway and Sweden.